It would be hard to name another who is simultaneously as obscure and as significant as Dimitri Pisarev (1840-1868). Generally acknowledged to be the most talented of a host of Russian radical writers who appeared in the mid-19th century, a giant among titans, Pisarev left an enduring legacy for Russian youth but nearly no mark in our own times. Nadezhda Krupskaya, wrote that, "Lenin was of the generation that grew up under the influence of Pisarev". Lenin himself, commenting on Pisarev’s description of himself as a “dreamer”, wrote, “Of this kind of dreaming there is unfortunately too little in our movement.”

Journalist, revolutionary, philospher, materialist, the prototype “nihlist”, Pisarev spent most of his life in prison (without ever being charged) and died, in mysterious circumstances, immediately after his release at the obscene age of 28. In that short life, his works were encyclopedic and his ideas so important that the Catholic Church still feels the need to produce polemics against him.

As far as I know, this is the only english translation of Pisarev’s remarkable essay, Bees on the internet. About this essay, Pisarev himself wrote, “We have not the good fortune to be doctrinarians, we have neither the ability nor the desire; we frankly confess that we have the weakness to be interested in real life, on however tiny a scale it is manifested, and not to be in the least interested in the barren productions of doctrinarian minds, whatever high-sounding phrases they may be clothed in. On these grounds we intend to talk to our readers, not on the theory of divine law or the law of historic progression, but simply on the domestic and social life of bees.”

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/1/1d/European_honey_bee_extracts_nectar.jpg/300px-European_honey_bee_extracts_nectar.jpg

Bees by Dimitri Pisarev

I.

The bee belongs to a species of insects; it has no spinal column and its body is divided into three well-defined parts; first, the head, in which are the eyes, antennae and mouth; second, the thorax, to which three pairs of legs are attached underneath and two pairs of wings on the upper side; third, the abdomen, in which are the heart and respiratory apparatus, the digestive system and sexual parts. On each side of its head the bee has two large eyes, consisting of thousands of microscopic facets looking out of a common transparent cornea. With these two eyes, the bee sees small things near it, they are for the bee what microscopes are for us; in order to see in the distance and direct its flight the bee uses three tiny ocelli situated on the upper part of the head. As far as we know from science in its present state of imperfection, man has not the type of eye by which the bee directs its flight. This is probably the only reason why most human judgments and constructions suffer from the short-sightedness of their makers.


As far as we know from science in its present state of imperfection, man has not the type of eye by which the bee directs its flight. This is probably the only reason why most human judgments and constructions suffer from the short-sightedness of their makers.

The bee’s mouth is most intricate in its structure: it will suffice to note the two horny mandibles which close like the blades of scissors, the little brushes with which the bee collects the pollen, and the long lower lip which is covered with hair and serves as a tongue—not, of course, for speech. I will not dwell on it, hut will merely remark that the worker bees bring honey and pollen to the hive, while the drones and the queen cannot do this. In their body the worker bees produce wax which is s secreted between the ringlets at the rear of the abdomen and is then used as building material in the hive. The queen bee and the drones cannot produce wax.

The worker bees are armed with a sting, hidden in the rear of the abdomen and connected to a bladder which secretes a pungent venomous liquid. Drones, being a privileged section dispensed from the obligation to defend society against its external enemies, have no sting. Their jaw is particularly strong and covered with notches as a result of which the drones are very voracious. The queen’s sting is longer and sharper than that of the ordinary bee, but she uses it only in duals with rivals for supremacy in the hive.

We thus see that the population of the hive is divided into three castes, distinguished from one another by external features. The head of the hive is the queen, the only female able to lay eggs; she can say in the literal sense of the word: l’état c’est moi, because she gives birth to all that lives and moves in the hive. Her abdomen is much longer than that of other bees; her sexual organs are fully developed, her wings, on the other hand, are considerably shorter; the result of this is that the queen rarely leaves the hive but spends her life enjoying ready-made food and satisfying her highly developed sexual urge. She flies out only to give herself to the drone she loves amidst nature in bloom, or to surrender her place to a successful rival.

The queen is followed by the drones or males, whose body is much bigger than that of the worker bees; they do not work, they have no weapon, they eat a lot, fertilize the queen in turn and otherwise know no care or obligations.

The worker bees or females are not able to bear offspring and it is not nature, but education, that is responsible for this. Insufficient feeding delays the development of their sexual system and condemns them to a life of labor without enjoyment. Not being able to live for themselves, the worker bees devote their activity to the education of the larvae to which the queen gives birth; all the honey they collect from the flowers goes to feed the larvae, the drones and the queen bee; all for the general good and nothing for themselves; the worker bee contributes with touching but absolutely ridiculous self-sacrifice to maintain the monstrous order of things which deprives her of the possibility to enjoy life and produce offspring. It is she that feeds hundreds of larvae badly and about a dozen others well so that the former will develop into sterile worker bees and the latter into full-blown females, queens. The worker bees are pitiable pariahs that do not feel their own humiliation, are unable to deliver themselves from it and maintain the following generation in the same humiliation, so that they, in their turn, will act in the same outrageous conservative spirit, and so on ad infinitum.

They are proletarians oppressed by the existing order of things, enchained in irremediable slavery, treading the mill unaware of any better condition. The eggs which the queen lays are all perfectly equal in quality: for the first three days, there is no difference between the larvae that hatch out of them, anyone of them may become a queen. Then starts the difference in education: one larva is placed in a special cell and fed with selected food, and the servants and nurses clean and wash it; out of it a queen will develop. Another larva, on the contrary, is confined in a narrow cell, fed with whatever happens to be handy and never cleaned; out of it an ordinary worker will develop. According to circumstances one worker bee will be stronger, another weaker; the stronger ones fly out and gather honey; the weaker ones remain at home, take care of the larvae and pupae, clean the cells and carry out various domestic duties. These careful nurses and housekeepers hurry from one cell to another; here a hungry grub must be fed, there a food store filled with honey must be sealed; somewhere else a cell in which an adult larva is metamorphosing into a pupa must be sealed and somewhere else again a large cell occupied by a queen pupa has to be cleaned; there is always something to do, and the laborious life of the worker bees goes on in an unending succession of duties, giving them no time to think of enjoyment or dream of a better future. When the young generation has been fed, there is more work to do: new cells have to be built in which honey will be stored; the sister workers on their return from work, or even the idle drone who has been wandering at liberty outside the hive, must be licked and cleaned; when it gets cold the nurses and housekeepers gather round the queen, warm her with the heat of their bodies and contemplate her like an elect, superior being. In short, there is no end to the self-sacrifice of the worker bees, and if self-sacrifice is a virtue and not stupidity, the worker bee must be considered the most virtuous creature in the world.

II.

The bee state, with all the elements it is composed of, has its history, its periodical agitations, its civil events and its upheavals. At one time a new swarm flies out of the ‘hive like a crowd of fearless colonists resolutely seeking happiness and space beyond the sea. The queen flies at their head, surrounded by the strongest workers ready to protect her against any danger and give their lives for what they consider as the common cause. This advanced group is followed at a short interval by the lazy drones and weak nurses and housekeepers. Writers of old, by the way, tell us that on such migrations the queen is surrounded by the drones, but that is most probably an error; if indeed it was so formerly, the change in the ceremonial is clear proof that the privileges connected with the title of drone are gradually decreasing and that the difference between the castes in the bee world is gradually disappearing before the law of common sense and the factual right of personal material strength. The queen does not like long flights, she soon alights on a branch, and her people settle in thick clusters round her, while a few of the strongest worker bees go on a reconnaissance flight to find a location for the new colony. Man generally anticipates this search and provides a ready-made dwelling offering all the necessary conveniences. The bees accept with gratitude, not understanding that they are delivering themselves as slaves and that man adjudges himself unbounded rights to dispose of their life and property, to take from them their honey and wax, to smoke them out, to daze them with sulphur and water, to chase them from one dwelling to another and even to kill them if, by his own considerations, it is not worth while feeding them with the very honey that they themselves collected. The bees do not foresee all these inconveniences of their new situation, and the whole swarm buzzes with joy as it flies into its new hive.

Once they have occupied their new home, the bees first close and seal all the openings, with the exception of a small hole through which contact between the hive and the outside world is maintained. They find a sticky substance on the young shoots of various trees, and with it they caulk all the cracks up as tight as possible in their endeavor to make their home inaccessible not only to all external enemies, but above all to the action of light from outside. Darkness is absolutely necessary to maintain the existing order. When a bee flies out of the hive, she is a free and energetic worker; at home she is oppressed and sacrificed to the external harmony of the state body, and, therefore, in order to submit to these oppressive conditions and bear without a murmur her privations and labors unmitigated by any pleasures, she must ignore the actual state of affairs and not see or understand how the queen and the drones spend their time. The first ray of light frightens the worker by revealing the sordidness and misery of her everyday life; she does not attribute her unpleasant feeling to the sight that the ray shows when it penetrates into the hive, but to the ray itself; she tries to eliminate it as we human beings endeavor to cast away doubts which arise; if the inquisitive naturalist makes a window in the hive, the bees will cover it up; if, in order to continue his observations, he takes out the daubed window, a tumult will arise in the hive; at the first rays of light the drones will crowd at the opening, trying to cover it up with their bodies; the worker bees will fly for paste to seal it up; the hive will be filled with buzzing, and the former situation will be restored only when darkness reigns again.

But if the observer constantly clears the opening sealed up by the worker bees and blocked by the drones, if the hive remains lighted despite all the resistance of the bee kingdom, everything will get disorganized little by little. The workers will stop working and will understand that the privileged classes are enjoying the fruits of their, the workers’, labors. They will cease to build combs and to feed the larvae; they will leave the queen unattended. Their buzzing will grow louder; they will cluster together as though discussing something, to the great horror of the Tory drones and the extreme displeasure of the queen, who will begin to feel hungry and lonely. The honey gatherers will return without honey, each will eat up what it has collected; finally, many of the worker bees will leave the hive altogether and will take up life in the open among flowering nature to their own complete satisfaction. The queen will starve, the drones will scatter, the larvae will die, and only the walls of the empty hive will bear witness to the recent existence of an element of state or flock. The workers will enjoy life as much as they can in their stunted condition, they will sport in the warm vastness of the air, hover over the meadows and fields in flower and revel in honey and freedom, l pollen to satiety and in the end, after enjoying their freedom, they will die as they lived, free citizens of the animal world. Some of the anarchists, however, will repent and try to settle in some other state, i.e., they will go and live in another hive and take upon themselves the same obligations that they fulfilled before.


…if the hive remains lighted despite all the resistance of the bee kingdom, everything will get disorganized little by little. The workers will stop working and will understand that the privileged classes are enjoying the fruits of their, the workers’, labors. They will cease to build combs and to feed the larvae; they will leave the queen unattended. Their buzzing will grow louder; they will cluster together as though discussing something, to the great horror of the Tory drones and the extreme displeasure of the queen, who will begin to feel hungry and lonely. The honey gatherers will return without honey, each will eat up what it has collected; finally, many of the worker bees will leave the hive altogether and will take up life in the open among flowering nature to their own complete satisfaction. The queen will starve, the drones will scatter, the larvae will die, and only the walls of the empty hive will bear witness to the recent existence of an element of state or flock..

But newcomers are not admitted; the natives at once recognize a foreigner and drive him away; if he is obstinate they kill him and throw his lifeless body out of their kingdom. Whether this Chinese hatred that bees have for foreigners is based on political or economic calculations is difficult to decide. Whether they fear the newcomer as an unnecessary consumer or a preacher of anti-constitutional principles has not yet been ascertained by those who have studied their civic organization. Whatever the case, there are two facts which cannot be doubted in the least: first, darkness is necessary for the calm and collective prosperity of the hive; second, bees who renounce the cherished standards of their social system are incapable of working out other standards for themselves and begin to live an entirely individual life which, though it has many good aspects, has indubitable purely practical inconveniences. Worker bees are capable of working and defending their society against external enemies; but the impulse to perform that work and that defense is given to them from outside by creatures which are incapable of working or fighting themselves. An extremely original division of labor exists in the hive: some work, others eat and produce offspring. Without this division of labor the breed cannot continue to exist; those that work are incapable of bearing offspring, and those that can produce offspring can not work. Bees are apparently spoiled by their monstrous citizenship; the plebeians are castrates, and the natural sexual functions are the privilege of one individual. Neither ancient Egypt nor ancient India attained such strict fulfillment of caste peculiarities; even the pariahs had the right to take to them selves a wife and to produce children; perhaps only modern England, with its constantly increasing population, will reach the point where marriage will be the privilege of a few persons or sections of society, and the proletariat, having neither hearth, home nor guarantee of bread, will be forbidden by law to have intercourse with women and produce children. Let it be noted incidentally that John Stuart Mill discusses this question of English life in his famous book On Liberty. He, the great individualist of our time, almost decides to acknowledge that society has the right to control marriages and forbid those which menace society with an increase of non-propertied citizens and therefore a lowering of piece wages. It is not far from such thoughts to the justification of the social institutions of bees, but it does honor to man that one can hope that such a will never be passed or firmly established; every pauper sooner die than be turned into a castrated worker living to be the foundation or building material of the social edifice. Some naturalists are in ecstasy at the intelligence of bees and their enviable ability to live in society with beings like themselves; it seems to me, on the contrary, that one must wonder at their monstrous oppression, which goes to such an extent that, stunted themselves, they systematically stunt others and, thus, at the same time are insensible victims and senseless butchers.

III.

Well, at last, the fissures have been covered up, darkness reigns and the state machine starts working. The first thing the worker bees do is to begin building combs, hexagonal wax a certain size, a definite shape and invariable architecture. No creative ability, individual thought or original talent is required for this. Every bee can build such cells and knows the proportion there must be between the different rooms. The smallest cells of all are built for worker bees, larger ones for drones, and as much wax is used for a queen as would be required for one hundred and fifty workers. The architects do not quarrel over the plan of the future buildings; each bee has long known every detail; there is no reason to submit a project, and provided it is dark and quiet, everything will go smoothly, because the idea of the constitution with its factual details has become part of the life of the working class.

The drones understand the privileges of their class; they give the builders no help, and in the heat of noon they fly out, not to fetch honey for the general good, but to fill their bellies with pollen in complete awareness of their superiority. Meanwhile, the worker bees fly out six or eight times a day and return every time with a full load of honey on their legs and in their stomach; all the honey they bring, or at least the larger part of it, goes to feed the queen, the drones and the larvae; the worker keeps for herself just enough to maintain her life and labor power.

The drones, being males, surround the queen, the only female in the whole hive, and do their best to deserve her favor; they crowd around her, lick and clean her, are most respectfully kind to her, vie with one another in declaring their profound devotedness, or, on occasion, their ardent love, and yet they live peaceably enough together thanks to their imperturbable indolent temperament and the absence of the deadly sting the worker bees are armed with.

The queen does not remain insensible to these sincere declarations of sentiment—her heart is not made of stone. Besides, she has an important task to fulfill—to produce out of her body a whole future generation of her people; she sets to work with great zeal. Her collaborators in the service of society are some six hundred drones, thanks to whose conscious cooperation the queen lays about two hundred eggs a day, or some twelve thousand in a month or a month and a half. In the morning, when the lazy drones are still asleep and the workers have already flown out for honey, the queen emerges from her cell accompanied by ten or twenty servants from among the worker bees. “With dignity she goes past the filled cells,” O’ken says, “and stops as soon as her retinue show her an empty one; first she puts her head into it to make sure that it is correctly built, then she turns her back to it, and at this decisive moment, her retinue gather in a close circle around her to hide her from inquisitive eyes. If at this moment the queen notices that the naturalist is looking at her, she passes on without laying any egg, deeply offended in her feminine modesty; but if all is quiet and dark around, she introduces the rear of her abdomen into the cell, after which a white elongated egg appears at the bottom.” She thus lays about five eggs and then rests for a few minutes; her servants surround her most assiduously, lick her whole body, clean her wings, and finally present her a drop of the best honey on the tip of their proboscis.

Three days later small white grubs or larvae are hatched from the eggs; they have a hard elongated head but no legs; these new-born beings are absolutely unable to look after themselves and the workers take them entirely under their care, because neither the queen nor the drones pay the slightest attention to them. The nurse workers prepare food out of pollen and honey, and feed the larvae with it, making a great difference between the food given to future proletarians and that which is fed to the future queens or noble drones. Worker larvae are fed for five days and drone larvae a little longer. After that period, the nurses seal the cells with wax and the larva begins its metamorphosis into a pupa, that is, it builds itself a cocoon out of fine silky threads. It is inside the cocoon that it develops into an adult insect, and when the development is complete the bee emerges from its seclusion, bursts its co coon, gnaws through the wax lid and comes out into the world in the form of a proletarian, a drone or a queen.

From the time the egg is laid to when the insect emerges from its cocoon the development lasts twenty-four days for a drone and twenty for a worker, but the queen can assume the care of the state and be considered an adult and fully entitled sovereign after sixteen days. The reason is that the queen bee needs a lesser degree of both physical and mental development than the worker bee. All her activity is concentrated in the sexual functions: she does not need muscular strength or thinking abilities; there is no need for her to build combs, to fly on long expeditions or extract particles of honey or aromatic pollen from flowers; her business is to be nice to the drones, without any necessity to win them from rivals, and then lay eggs without any concern for the subsequent fate of her future descendants. Her people knows its business quite well and the whole state machine goes at full speed without any need or even possibility of interference on her part. To occupy her honorable post, which involves no obligations whatsoever, she does not need great intelligence, and therefore it is not surprising that the development of the queen bee is much more rapid than that of the worker. The personality of the queen has no influence whatsoever on matters in the hive; the bees respect in her the personification of the idea which maintains them in their civil society and does not allow them to scatter, but it does not matter to them whether their queen is a motionless, completely unconscious egg, a regal larva or a sleeping pupa. If sudden death cut short the state solicitude of the adult queen, the inhabitants of the hive would not be embarrassed: the proletarians, who constitute the real force in bee society, know that queens are developing among the eggs or the cocoons; they are tranquil about the future of the hive and therefore continue their work as if nothing particular had happened.

But why do the drones, whose activity is just as limited as the queen’s, whose mental abilities are absolutely insignificant, take so long to develop? Vogt explains this by the physical sluggishness which is typical of the drones; eternally idle, unable to work or show concern for anything at all, they even develop more slowly and lazily than other bees; the lordly clumsiness and phlegm typical of this privileged class of the bee state permeate it even in the embryo.

IV.

Bees have no permanent army: every proletarian constantly carries its weapon with it and knows how to use it; every soldier in this national guard is inspired by patriotic feelings which are shown in their ardent hatred of humble-bees, wasps and even bees from other hives; if some incautious or impudent member of another tribe takes it into his head to fly into the hive, he will have a bad time of it: hundreds of worker bees will rush at him, making use of jaw and sting; the wanderer will inevitably be killed and his body will be thrown out of the hive as a warning to others. In a hive there are generally up to twenty thousand worker bees, and yet bees are never deceived and never allow a citizen of another hive into their society. Whether the incoming bee exchanges conventional signs with those on guard at the entrance is difficult to decide, but it is reliably known that members of neighboring hives are not allowed to pay visits and that every hive obstinately keeps its domestic affairs hidden from the eyes of strangers. But there is a means of destroying the tribal hatred existing between bees of different hives: you have only to throw them all into water; they go crazy and lose consciousness. Then you take them out and lay them in the sun so that they gradually dry and come to their senses; they begin to move, preen their wings and legs, stretch themselves and try to help their comrades who have not yet awakened from their lethargy. After this common misfortune, the national hostility is forgotten; bees from two hives can be placed in one and they will join efforts to build combs and rear the young generation.

As far as we know, it is only as far as bees are concerned that water is a remedy for national antipathies; we cannot say for sure whether it would have the same wonderful effect on citizens of two hostile states, because we have no positive experience. We may note, by the way, that water has this salutary effect on bees only if the queen of one hive is killed; if, on the other hand, both queens are thrown into the water together, they will start hostilities against each other as soon as they recover consciousness; a cluster of workers will support each of them, and the stronger side will expel the weaker from the hive; after the tussle, the former hostility will be resumed with renewed vigor until they are given another dipping. In some respects, the Germans are like bees. At home in Germany they usually support the petty local interests of the separate states. Natives of Bavaria, Wurttemberg, Baden, Hanover, Schaumburg-Lippe or Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen consider one another as foreigners and speak respectively of their own separate country and their own separate patriotism; but if those same citizens of various German hives cross the sea and settle in the states of America, there, because of the unity of tongue, customs and outlook, they realize that they have a lot in common, that they are all Germans and can sympathize with one another without any concern for territorial misunderstandings and dynastic rivalries. The crossing of the Atlantic, as you see, replaces the beneficial dipping.

The principal and almost only aim of worker bees’ activity is to rear the young generation. Their respect for the insignificant personality of the queen and their tolerance of the idle voracity of the drones is explained by the fact that they see in the queen their only hope, the future mother of the whole offspring and in the drones her necessary collaborators and, therefore, an inevitable evil without which their state system cannot be maintained. The personality of the nurses, who are chosen from the workers, is an honorable one: they are exempted from flying out to get their food; they are fed by the state; they are respected and cherished by the other bees in spite of their physical puniness. If we consider human society and think of the importance of the teacher in the state, society and family, we will be forced to admit that bees understand the importance of education better than we do. But we must not be too enthusiastic over the virtues of bees; suppose you live only to educate your son, your son lives only to educate your grandson, and so on; each individual generation first gets itself ready for life and then prepares others for life, but when will they have time to live? And why prepare others for something that they will not be able to enjoy? The bees do very well to show great concern for the well-being of the young generation, but to be castrated for the sake of the offspring, so that it in its turn will emasculate itself for the sake of the following generation is, if you do not mind my saying so, monstrous, and in this respect we are not so stupid as bees. The most ridiculous thing in the life of bees is that they probably presume that their self-sacrifice is great and noble, as if they were sacrificing themselves to provide happiness and enjoyment for others, whereas, in reality, it turns out that only the drones and the queen, i.e., the most useless, vain and least conscientious in their society, derive any benefit from their labors and sufferings. It seems that idealism and doctrinarianism which has lost all contact with life are very common diseases, and man, who considers them as great privileges of his race, can and must admit that they exist even in tiny insects. Probably the bee, like Plato and Hegel, builds her own world system in which she is the centre of everything that moves and lives, and yet, while she wastes time on these serious occupations and drifts into the boundless sphere of pure thought, she resembles the great lights of poor humanity and either does not notice or does not wish to notice that the honey which she obtained through her labor is stolen from her and her sexual organs are systematically mutilated. When she happens to notice this fact, she makes a sudden turn-about, but idealism, or—what is just the same—confusion, wins the day, and after a certain amount of agitation, the bee world settles down in the same old rut as before and ossifies within the old framework.


The most ridiculous thing in the life of bees is that they probably presume that their self-sacrifice is great and noble, as if they were sacrificing themselves to provide happiness and enjoyment for others, whereas, in reality, it turns out that only the drones and the queen, i.e., the most useless, vain and least conscientious in their society, derive any benefit from their labors and sufferings. It seems that idealism and doctrinarianism which has lost all contact with life are very common diseases, and man, who considers them as great privileges of his race, can and must admit that they exist even in tiny insects.

V.

The queen of the bee kingdom is extremely good-natured and mild as long, as she lives in the hive, i.e., as long as she neither has nor foresees any rival. Her feminine gentleness is illustrated by her friendly relations with the drones and the calm majesty with which she accepts expressions of devotedness in the form of drops of honey from the lowest of the proletarians. Her good nature does not forsake her even when she comes into contact with man, the fiercest exploiter of the bee world. You can take the queen in your hand, stroke and caress her with out any fear of her sting; for this reason scientists of old even presumed that the queen had no sting at all and that her regal person allowed her subjects to beat back the external enemies and punish the violators of public order. This is indeed so in the majority of cases, but there are also times in the queen’s life when passion is stronger than the stipulations of etiquette, drowns the voice of regal feeling, and turns the mild, majestically calm, femininely tender creature into a kind of Lady Macbeth, a Medea, or, in general, to something like the characters that are to be found only in the most perverted human nature. Woe if the queen begins to fear for her sovereignty, woe if she sees or has a foreboding of a rival. Two queens are as incompatible as two suns on one horizon; they hate each other like ambitious rulers and coquettes; each loves two outstanding features in her situation: the devotedness of the proletarians and the chivalrous courtesy of the lord drones; both proletarians and drones must belong to the queen alone and undivided; the former are the’ material support of her domination, the latter form her harem, in the midst of which she drops a handkerchief and makes now one, then the other, happy.

Thus everything goes on in calm and to the common satisfaction of subjects and ruler, proletarians and lords, but suddenly news comes to the queen’s chambers which more or less bewilders and disquietens all of them; there is nothing’ unexpected in this news and yet it always makes a profound impression. The news is that one of the pupae is becoming a queen bee and is gnawing through the wax lid of its cell; the nurse in charge of this cell reports the event in the appropriate quarters and the news flashes like lightening to the most distant corners of the bee kingdom. Rumors and discussions begin to spread. The young inexperienced bees display nothing but curiosity and alarmed joy, the old proletarians, who have seen grief and joy, state upheavals and scenes of gross violence in their day, anticipate what is going to happen and confer among themselves, in their indecision; there will certainly be a clash between the old queen and the young one. Who will come out victorious and whom should they support? The ruler whom they have served with such devotion and who has rewarded them with such favorable regards, or the young creature who has grown under their attention, fed by their care, fostered with their love? While the good worker bees are wondering and puzzling, the old queen quickly decides to act. With her retinue of servants and drones she hurries to the cell, around which a crowd of workers has assembled, waiting with reverent impatience for the solution of the portentous problem. It is not love for the daughter who is being born that brings the old queen to her cradle; she approaches and sees in her daughter her most dangerous rival; the jealousy of the female and the ambition of the ruler speak within her; her irritation is manifest in her haste, her trenchant gestures, her lack of attention for the groups she passes, gathered around the fateful cell. The worker bees have a presentiment that something evil is brewing; the young proletarians, who are childhood companions of the young queen, cluster instinctively nearer to her dwelling and endeavor to cut off the mother’s approach to the newly developing creature. The old queen wishes to pass them, but they do no let her; if she succeeds in overcoming their resistance she will go right up to the cell, introduce her sting into it and kill her daughter before she has had time to see the world and enjoy the fullness of life. But in most cases the good-natured workers are the stronger: they succeed in restraining the infuriated queen and, not knowing what to do, listening to no exhortations, the wrathful queen is convinced that the end of her rule has come; she is plunged into impotent despair and runs aimlessly all over the hive.

The matter ends by the old queen and her faithful retinue and loving drones leaving the hive and flying away to seek happiness in the blue distance, in a natural hollow in a tree or in an artificial hive. Meanwhile the young queen emerges from her cell in the fascinating freshness of youth, ignorant even of the danger from which the self-sacrifice and devoted- ness of the good-natured workers have saved her. The bees who have remained surround her, and her first impression of bee life is the inebriation of triumph and power which she herself did not make a movement to acquire. She looks round, sees her superiority over the lords and proletarians surrounding her, asks herself in alarm whether she alone will enjoy the glamour of ‘power and respect which has surrounded her from the first moment of her conscious life. The very instinct which urged the queen mother to attempt on the life of ‘her daughter and then forced her to leave the hive with her supporters, appear and develop with amazing rapidity in the young queen; she surveys all her domain, goes up to each cell where her young sisters are developing, stabs them with her venomous sting and thus kills all future queens so as to have no rivals and reign with undivided sway. It sometimes happens that two young queens emerge at the same time from their cells. In that case the old queen does not even try to kill her successors; she gathers a small group of faithful veterans and beloved lord drones and flies away with them to a new residence. As for the young queens, they naturally cannot live together; the ties of blood are powerless when it is a question of sovereignty, one of the two must perish, because neither will agree to yield of her free will and found a new colony. Neither the workers nor the drones take part in the fight between two queens; the struggle for mastery is of interest only to their two persons and it is decided by a duel in which nobody begs and nobody grants mercy. The rivals go up to each other, bite each other, trying to wound neck, head or legs, and to daze each other with the beating of their wings; they butt each other with their heads, tussle with their legs and seek a convenient opportunity to stab the enemy with their deadly sting. They aim at the interstices between the horny plates protecting the thorax and abdomen; the neck, the joint between thorax and abdomen are also easy to pierce, and at these parts, too, blows are directed. Finally the duel comes to its tragic end, the mortal weapon finds its target, the wounded queen falls. The agony is not long: in an outburst of proud joy the happy victor jeers over the corpse of her slain sister. Now she is alone, the ruler of the hive; the workers cluster round her and acknowledge her supremacy. But at the beginning their sympathy seems rather half-hearted. The fact is that the young queen has committed a series of crimes and has not yet given any sign of her qualities. The worker bees saw the cruel logic with which she destroyed in their very cradles her presumptive rivals, the same innocent babes that they, the workers, cherished and fed; they saw how implacable she was in the duel with her twin sister, for all that happened under their very eyes; but nobody can as yet judge how much benefit the young queen can bring to their hive. Her mildness, her justice and—the main thing—her fertility, are still absolutely unknown to the worker bees. That is why a torturing doubt restrains the manifestations of their assiduity and they bow to the new queen with a frigid reserved courtesy in which one can feel the unspoken question: what will the future be like?

But the lord drones know no doubts: they are not interested in the prosperity of the hive, they only see the person of the queen, and when the quarrel over the succession is settled, they vie in declaring their profound loyalty. They deafen the queen with buzzing flattery, lick her back, head and legs, clean her wings and antennae with the brushes on their legs, and speak to her in a lively language of mimicry. In short, they display what for them is unusual familiarity, spirit of enterprise, and energy. At first the queen finds all this court ballet very strange. Like Elizabeth, the virgin queen of England, the young bee queen is somewhat cold and even outraged at the passionate and often too bold compliments of the court drones. She some times thinks of using her venomous sting to scatter the brilliant crowd of importunate fondlers and courtiers. But, as you know, life soon stirs us; the passions awake one after another; ambition, which was displayed in the young queen by her bloody feats, is followed by sensuality; the passionate caresses of the drones develop and strengthen it; the girl becomes a woman; this inexperienced, shy and bashful creature begins to have a presentiment of the fullness of sensual enjoyment that can be got from life; the drones surround her with unrelenting entreaties, now timid and respectful, then passionate and exalted. Her heart is not made of stone; the queen submits, she arranges a court fête and flies out of the hive amidst a jubilating throng of drones to gambol in the pure air among fragrant flowers in the surrounding clearings, meadows and plains. Elizabeth finds her Leicester.

What happens at the court banquets and picnics is a thing no naturalist can tell us. One cannot keep under observation a few score of bees who have left the hive to frisk and gambol; the common mortal cannot delve into the secrets of the queen’s heart; the corollas of the flowers among which the drones revel with the young queen preserve no less profound a silence than the deer park at Versailles. We can presume that during these revelries the queen enjoys herself to her heart’s content, for she returns exhausted, worn out, and covered with dust. Whether one single drone is the exclusive object of her favors or whether several lucky ones share this great honor is a question which will remain unanswered for man as well as for the mass of citizens in the bee state. Anyhow, the citizens have no concern for that; they devote just as little attention to the drones as before, but they treat the queen with the most affectionate and respectful tenderness. So far, of course, they have not been able to note anything particularly comforting in the queen’s personal character. The cruelty that she displayed in killing her potential rivals yielded to an unbridled outburst of sensuality. I do not know whether sensuality is considered a great quality In the bees’ moral code, but there is reliable information that for about twenty thousand females who make up the bulk of the hive’s population, there is only one who is the depository of that quality and that single female is the center from which radiates and to which converges the whole activity of the hive.

Bees apparently worship the productive force of nature; in this respect they are at one with the ancient peoples of Asia Minor; the queen is to them exactly what the goddess Astarte was to the Babylonians and Assyrians—the symbol of the principle of female fecundity. The bees’ worship, however, has as its object not some fantastic character personifying an abstract idea, but an actually existing individual; it is closely linked with the idea of the state and is determined by the social system which the underdeveloped bees consider necessary for its prosperity. The queen is a sort of Dalai Lama; she is considered an object of primary necessity; her person is sacred and inviolable; each of her subjects, the poorest of the proletarians, regards it as her most sacred duty and greatest delight to make sacrifices to her, to offer her a drop of the purest and sweetest honey on her return to the hive from work in the fields. This is done not by calculation or the desire to curry favor, but with the most artless and naïve religious feeling. The proletarian considers her queen a superior being and in this she is fully justified. Every day before her eyes the queen works wonders which silence even the most obstinate doubt; she lays eggs, i.e., visibly accomplishes feats which not one of the numerous inmates of the hive feels capable of. Every day she brings into the world up to two hundred beings like herself, and this goes on, not for a week or two, but for two whole months. The queen creates, but the proletarian only works; how, then, could the proletarians not feel crushed and admit all the queen’s greatness and their own insignificance?


Bees apparently worship the productive force of nature; in this respect they are at one with the ancient peoples of Asia Minor; the queen is to them exactly what the goddess Astarte was to the Babylonians and Assyrians—the symbol of the principle of female fecundity. The bees’ worship, however, has as its object not some fantastic character personifying an abstract idea, but an actually existing individual; it is closely linked with the idea of the state and is determined by the social system which the underdeveloped bees consider necessary for its prosperity. The queen is a sort of Dalai Lama; she is considered an object of primary necessity; her person is sacred and inviolable; each of her subjects, the poorest of the proletarians, regards it as her most sacred duty and greatest delight to make sacrifices to her, to offer her a drop of the purest and sweetest honey on her return to the hive from work in the fields. This is done not by calculation or the desire to curry favor, but with the most artless and naïve religious feeling.

No skepticism can withstand such obvious and continually repeated proofs, and, indeed, there are no skeptics in the bee kingdom. And why should such unruly and ill-minded people be suffered in a well-organized society? When the queen returns to the hive after her first picnic, the proletarians begin to believe in her; they know that the results of her absence will soon be visible; they know that the queen will soon begin to show concern for the increase of the population and, therefore, seeing her as the future mother of the young generation, they show solicitude for her health and tranquility, they manifest the most heartfelt respect and the most touching, though at the same time the most reverential sympathy. The workers throng around her and solemnly carry her into the hive, lick her and clean her, feed her with their proboscis and inform everybody of the joyful tidings: “The sovereign has deigned to contract wedlock with one of the noble lords.” The epithet lawful is not added to the noun wedlock, because for bees, every wedlock which takes place is natural, and therefore lawful. The name of the happy chosen one or ones is not proclaimed either, for nobody is interested in t; the bees serve the cause, not persons, the important thing is the fact, not the circumstances.

The usual course of affairs in the hive is smooth, calm and as regular .as clockwork and disturbed only occasionally by unfortunate eventualities. The queen, notwithstanding her ex elusive situation and the creative power with which the generosity of nature has endowed her, is subject to the same laws as we, common mortals. Like the most insignificant of her subjects, she may fall ill and die, leaving her hive in the most helpless situation at the very time when it most needs her Ia- hours for the common good. A boy can crush her with his hand or a flapper, and it will not occur to him that he is causing the horrors of an interregnum for a whole people or at least a whole town. When a queen dies after laying eggs, which can in time develop into new queens, there are no horrors, everything continues with the same orderliness as before; the same bubbling activity is to be seen everywhere, and the nominal queen is the oldest egg, the oldest larva or the oldest pupa. This nominal queen generally becomes the actual queen, because, developing earlier than its sisters, it has time to kill them all and there fore becomes ruler of the hive. One cannot even say that the time during which an egg or a pupa is considered the queen of the hive is a particularly bad one for the bees; neither an egg nor a pupa needs food, public expenditures therefore obviously decrease; on their return to the hive the worker bees necessarily keep for themselves the best drops of honey which they would usually offer their sovereign in an outburst of reverential zeal; thus, there is no disadvantage for them. But their assiduity is above all calculation and the voice of common sense; they await the appearance of the new queen with supreme impatience and greet it with the most joyful buzzing.

If the queen dies during the time when she lays only eggs out of which worker larvae can hatch, there is disarray in the whole hive. The principle of religion and monarchy must be saved cost what may; the bees cannot understand life and see no salvation outside the age-long accepted standards consecrated by thousands of years of existence. There is no queen and there is nobody to replace her—what must they do? The only thing is to try whether by careful tending, select food and intensified unrelenting care, the plebeian nature of a common egg can be ennobled, and whether the wonder-working virtue which creates beings to its own likeness and which the artless inhabitants of the hive worshipped in their former queen cannot be developed in the future larvae. Extreme agitation at once takes pos session of the hive. The partitions near the cell where the fortunate egg which is to be turned into a queen lies are broken down and the place is cleared; the dwelling is enlarged, and the larva which is hatched from the egg begins to enjoy the com fort, roominess and cleanliness which are indispensable for the development of the sexual organs. In order to provide against any eventuality and prevent the death of the chosen larva from leading to a new interregnum, the workers do the same with several eggs, and several queens are thus prepared at the same time; later they will fight between one another with their weapons for sovereignty in the hive.

Internecine struggles are not dangerous for the hive because they take the form of duels in which the worker bees and drones have no part. As soon as a queen emerges from a pupa which was initially intended to become a worker bee, she begins to display the same tendencies as her predecessors. She engages in the same deadly tussle with her rivals, if there are any, and destroys in the embryo in exactly the same way anything that can be of danger for her unlimited sovereignty. Then she receives the courting of the drones in exactly the same way, arranging a picnic and entering into wedlock, and the life of the hive resumes its former course.

Bees have a sort of instinctive understanding of the importance of material conditions. In order to develop certain propensities in a young being and to strengthen in it the qualities which it will have to apply for the whole of its life, they begin to feed it with a definite kind of food, allot to it a spacious dwelling, take care of its cleanliness and perfectly achieve their aim; out of a modest, hard-working, impassionate and good-natured proletarian, they make a proud ambitious queen, cruel towards her rivals, absolutely incapable of work, but, on the other hand, extraordinarily fertile and prone to sensual delights.

With their sober outlook bees could make magnificent discoveries in the field of natural science, but unfortunately their concern for their daily bread absorbs all the living forces of the thinking portion of the bee people. They have no estate of scientists, no academies or universities, they have not even any embryo of literature or poetry. They do not draw even the simplest conclusions from facts that are constantly before their eyes; they cannot, for instance, reason as follows: a worker larva can turn into a queen if I feed it with good substantial food; the queen is therefore the same as a worker bee, only she is better fed and more developed; why should we not feed all alike, so that all may enjoy life equally and bear children? The bee is absolutely incapable of reasoning that far, probably because her urgent work leaves her no time for philosophy. “Le travail est un frein,” (“Work is a bridle”) Guizot said in the thirties, and that saying, which he magnanimously applied to French craftsmen, is valid for in sects as well as for human beings. Oppressed by work which gives them neither rest nor respite from the moment of their birth, the proletariat of the bee kingdom sets up no social theories and does not think of the meaning of life; the result is that the forms of existence in the hive remain unchanged, invariable and motionless. There is no motion of thought; the constant progress is imperceptible; not a single usage, not a single institution seems antiquated or is replaced by a new one. But calm is maintained in the hive only as long as there are sufficient supplies, as long as the hive is surrounded by meadows in bloom where thousands of bees can find abundant forage every day. The rainy autumn no sooner sets in, the field flowers no sooner fade and shed their petals than the inmates of the hive feel uneasy; economic difficulties arise; the drones clash in their interests with the proletarians, and this clash leads to terrible bloodshed, which clearly proves the worthlessness of the constitution by which the hive is governed.

VI.

It is not out of place to note that the stock of honey accumulated in the hive belongs to the worker bees, who defend their property with might and main and allow nobody to take possession of their economic supplies. Nobody makes up his mind to do so as long as the surrounding meadows are covered with flowers; the drones then go to breakfast and dinner outside the hive. But as autumn sets in, such a way of life becomes impossible; the worker bees themselves often return with an empty stomach and no honey or pollen on their legs; the noble drones, who are heavy on the wing and do not like to be away from their home in the hive for a long time, find nothing to feed on, and after circling over the yellow grass, they return hungry and dissatisfied. Then there is agitation in the hive the meaning of which can be most palpably conveyed in the form of a conference and negotiations between representatives of the different classes, parties and views in the hive.

The drones assemble in groups and hum querulously as they convey to one another discomforting reports on the sterility of the surrounding meadows and still more discomforting opinions of the starvation they can expect in the circumstances.

“We are the privileged estate,” one of them exclaims, proudly preening his wings, “we enjoy the high favors of our gracious sovereign. The workers must show concern for our situation. That is their explicit duty; during the summer they collected a large quantity of honey, and we should have our share of it. We have by birth the right to profit by the wealth of society. Now, most unfortunately, we see how the uneducated mob doubts our right. The worker bees think the stock belongs to them alone, because they alone gathered it and stored it in the cells. They are obviously turning the very foundations of logic and right upside down. Those stocks belong to society, and our bee state has the right to dispose of them according to its discretion to cover its essential needs. And must not the maintenance of our life and welfare always be considered an essential requirement of the state? Can a hive exist without drones, with out a governing estate? The stocks are ours, ours first and fore most. Once our existence is guaranteed we shall be willing to give part of the excess to the poor hungry workers, but we must first appease our hunger and assure ourselves food for the f u hire. Let us go to the queen, expound our wishes to her and submit our declaration of rights to her consideration.”

The enterprising orator’s speech pleases the audience: it conforms to the needs of the time, it provides a satisfactory settlement for the terrible problem set by circumstances: to eat or not to eat? and it consequently meets unanimous support.

The deputies from the noble estate of drones go to the queen and she, far from devouring them as the inhabitants of the Sandwich Islands devoured the European parliamentarians, is very gracious towards them and listens to their most humble petition with great attention. Then she answers in such a strain that the lord drones could wish for no better.

“I have always been convinced,” she says, casting a glance of good-will on all present, “that the stability and prosperity of the state requires that there should be a hereditary estate of peers; if that estate is eliminated, all the governmental foundations of society will fall to ruin. You have served me faithfully, you have shown devotion to my person, and your valor fully entitles you to a reward. There can be no doubt that you, be fore anybody else, have a right to enjoy the stores that have been accumulated. As your sovereign, I give you my word of honor: your interests will in no way suffer from the calamity that has befallen us. Do not heed the murmurs of the worker bees; their function is to work, and as long as they carry out their duty with the appropriate assiduity I shall maintain my gracious attitude towards them. But you, my peers, must not he concerned about your food; you have a higher and more noble calling; do not forget that; leave the petty worry about your daily bread to the lower beings who are less ennobled than you by the gifts of nature. To conclude I express my sincere gratitude to you, my lords, for applying with such confidence to your queen.”

The drones jubilate and glorify the grandeur, magnanimity and statesmanship of their sovereign.

Meanwhile the proletarians, alarmed by the withering flowers, likewise gather in groups to confer.

1862

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Hey thanks anax this is excellent you've been promising this for a while. I'd vaguely heard of Pisarev before but I had no idea he died at 28.

Thanks so much for that. What a fine job of explaining how hierarchy works. Though I expect that subsequent natural history, Tinburgen, etc, might knock some wholes in it that is irrelevant to the point of the essay.

Curiously, about 10 days ago I found a small swarm, or part of a swarm in my house upon returning home from work. A few dozen were in bedroom banging against the screen, these were liberated. In the basement things were more complicated. Maybe 200 there, many floating in turtle tanks dead or alive, confounded by the artificial lights. Many banging against the windows, a small mass of them in an open tank with pine chip bedding, could the queen have been there? Got them all outside as best I could. Now I walk through the house quietly every day upon getting home, listening for buzzing in the walls. What would Pisarev have to say about that?

Thanks so much for that. What a fine job of explaining how hierarchy works. Though I expect that subsequent natural history, Tinburgen, etc, might knock some wholes in it that is irrelevant to the point of the essay.

Curiously, about 10 days ago I found a small swarm, or part of a swarm in my house upon returning home from work. A few dozen were in bedroom banging against the screen, these were liberated. In the basement things were more complicated. Maybe 200 there, many floating in turtle tanks dead or alive, confounded by the artificial lights. Many banging against the windows, a small mass of them in an open tank with pine chip bedding, could the queen have been there? Got them all outside as best I could. Now I walk through the house quietly every day upon getting home, listening for buzzing in the walls. What would Pisarev have to say about that?

Buzzing in the walls means the Gestapo is onto you is what Pisarev would tell you. Oh wait..wrong time period sorry ;)

Hey thanks anax this is excellent you've been promising this for a while. I'd vaguely heard of Pisarev before but I had no idea he died at 28.

http://www.populistindependent.org/phpb ... ight=#1286 (http://www.populistindependent.org/phpbb/viewtopic.php?p=1286&highlight=#1286)


It was there again that, a few years later, Dimitri Pissareff was imprisoned for having taken up the same noble work. Compelled to abandon it in the fortress, he did not lie idle: he wrote his remarkable analysis of the “Origin of the Species,” one of the most popular, and surely the most attractive ever penned. Two great talents were thus destroyed precisely as they were reaching their full growth. Tchernyshevsky was sent to Siberia, where he was kept for twenty years, in the mines first, and then, for thirteen years, in Viluisk, a hamlet of a few houses situated on the confines of the Arctic region. A petition for release, signed by an International Literary Congress, produced no effect. The Autocrat was so much afraid of the influence Tchernyshevsky might enjoy in Russia, that he permitted him to return from Siberia and to be settled at Astrakhan, only when he had no more to fear from his noble pen: when the writer was a ruin after a twenty years’ life of privation and sufferings among semi-savages. There was a simulacrum of judgment passed upon Tchernyshevsky; his writings, all of which had passed through the hands of the Censorship, his novel written in the fortress, were brought forward as so many proofs of guilt before the Senate. Pissareff was not even brought before a court: he was merely kept in the fortress until reported harmless…He was drowned a few months after his release.

Of course, Dimitri Pisarev and Dimitri Pissareff are one and the same.

What stopped me cold about the essay above was the humor in it. Pisarev is sitting in one of the worst dungeons in the world and he is writing about bees and cracking jokes.

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...many floating in turtle tanks....
What sort of turtles BP?

Two interesting species here, the Wood Turtle and and occasional Western Painted Turtles that apparently float across Lake Michigan on debris from Wisconsin. Wood Turtles live like tortoises, eating out of the water and spending their time on land but mate in the water (hence “turtles”) and have learned to forage in fields after they have been plowed.

...many floating in turtle tanks....
What sort of turtles BP?

Two interesting species here, the Wood Turtle and and occasional Western Painted Turtles that apparently float across Lake Michigan on debris from Wisconsin. Wood Turtles live like tortoises, eating out of the water and spending their time on land but mate in the water (hence “turtles”) and have learned to forage in fields after they have been plowed.

Oh hell, now you've got me started. Chiapan Giant Musk Turtles(male hatched 3/15/74), Mississippi Mud Turtle(obtained early '68), Flattened Musk Turtles(App I, grandfathered,obtained '77), Gulf Coast Box Turtles( juveniles, adult outside,since '89), Texas Map Turtles(captive born founders obtained '96, 19 now on hand). They aren't pets, they're pentioners. Nothing really spiffy by the lights of those damned "herpetoculturists" who have turned reptile keeping into a multi-million dollare drain on wild populations. I digress.

The Wood Turtles you mention are perhaps the coolests of all turtles, Tinburgen studied them and considered them the most intelligent of reptiles. Wild populations are in serious decline, habitat as always is an issue but the real killer has been their attractiveness. They've been poached mercilessly,fetching an average of $150 each retail, and are protected in all states that they are native to. They also hibernate on land.

Which brings me to world trade. Now that we've made some Chinese rich enough for exotic bling, having destroyed their own turtle populations for their magical properties and working hammer and tong to wipe out SE Asia's turtles they've got their sights on ours. Trappers, often associated with the New Orleans restaurant business, travel thru the south in big reefers, trapping turtles by the thousands and just piling them in the reefer, those on the bottom getting crushed, but what the hell, the money's great. Just one more fucking issue.

Thanks for asking. :P

I have had a number of pensioners staying with me over the years. I forgot to mention Blanding's turtles which we have here as well. They like to trek around on land, too.

I made a trip once years ago to Reelfoot Lake - turtle Valhalla with species from the upper and lower Mississsippi and the Ohio drainages. I saw an amazing number of turtles there, Cooters galore, map turtles (Leseur's?), softshells (rare here) etc. In the rivers that flow into the Gulf, there are a whole bunch of different species of map turtles and I was on a mission for a few years to see all of them.

Max Beerbaum says: "The ever industrious ants and incessantly busy bees have set an example for us all and it is not a good one."

Bees are fascinating. I once harbored dreams of being a beekeeper. Never followed up.

Along the way I bumped into Jed Schoener in Virgnia. He of the world's longest bee beard. I expected to find some funky eccentric out in the back country. The back country was there but not the funky. After this brief "interview" and his showing me his Guiness Book of World record certificate he sped off in his BMW and izod shirt to go golfing. Oh well.

Thanks for the heads up. This is great and I'll post it around. You're a minor genius friend.

Max Beerbaum says: "The ever industrious ants and incessantly busy bees have set an example for us all and it is not a good one."

Bees are fascinating. I once harbored dreams of being a beekeeper. Never followed up.

Along the way I bumped into Jed Schoener in Virgnia. He of the world's longest bee beard. I expected to find some funky eccentric out in the back country. The back country was there but not the funky. After this brief "interview" and his showing me his Guiness Book of World record certificate he sped off in his BMW and izod shirt to go golfing. Oh well.

Thanks for the heads up. This is great and I'll post it around. You're a minor genius friend.


You misspelled 'miner'....

http://www.atwitsend.org/Miner%20W%20VA%20-%205%20copy.jpg


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You misspelled 'miner'....
If it was a miner mistake, why worry about it?

Good stuff here, anaxarchos. Thanks.

http://www.electionfraudnews.com/Articles/Bees.htm

I have to say that Pisarev is one of my favorite writers, after just a few pages. This is remarkably inventive but beyond that, he's anticipated and surpassed Brecht's concept of alienation. Imagine, and he did, taking a species like bees to make his various arguments (I'm not ready to comment on the whole work yet, I have to let it sink in over night).

Why pick bees? I'd like to know, but if it's not known, then I'd like to think that, as an artist, he simply remembered instruction or read just before he wrote this about the hierarchical perfection of the seemingly unjust society of winged workers.

The poor drones, they sound so pathetic - all they can do is consume. The workers who make everything work are left in a state of (I want to say 'institutional') malnutrition, yet they persevere. The Queen, made not begotten, has some appeal until Pisarev describes the migrations. At that point, he reveals, I believe, the true nature of leadership as it exists. She flies with the swarm but can go only so far, at which point rest is required. Isn't that the nature of leadership, that it seems to end always with failure by falling far short of it's original goal due to ultimate weakness of the leader. Why is this? At this point, that's the question that interests me.

http://enciklopedia.fazekas.hu/gallery/vilag/large/brecht2.jpg
he's anticipated and surpassed
Brecht's concept of alienation.

Thank you for posting this. It's a gift!

This parable certainly exposes the limits of analogy. 'Drone' has the connotation of uselessness, but in fact drone bees do the ova-fertilising, which is a slightly vital role for any colony that wants to continue in business.

I wonder how productive it is to make a political point if you have to rely on people's ignorance for it to work. I find it hard to see that as respectful. Of course, a little classist contempt for the peasantry has frequently seemed to characterise the academic/vangardist species of socialist.

You misspelled 'miner'....
If it was a miner mistake, why worry about it?

God stuff here, anaxarchos. Thanks.

I've been waiting for Wolf to show up so I could say,

"..and now we have 'the Boids and the Bees'."


.

He's anticipated and surpassed
Brecht's concept of alienation.

Thank you for posting this. It's a gift!

http://www.smh.com.au/ffximage/2006/08/13/brecht_narrowweb__300x425,0.jpg
"Under Capitalism you sell your piss to the urinal."

Bertolt Brecht

.

There is unrest in the forest
There is trouble with the trees
For the maples want more sunlight
And the oaks ignore their pleas

The trouble with the maples
(and they're quite convinced they're right)
They say the oaks are just too lofty
And they grab up all the light
But the oaks can't help their feelings
If they like the way they're made
And they wonder why the maples
Cant be happy in their shade?

There is trouble in the forest
And the creatures all have fled
As the maples scream `oppression!`
And the oaks, just shake their heads

So the maples formed a union
And demanded equal rights
the oaks are just too greedy
We will make them give us light
Now theres no more oak oppression
For they passed a noble law
And the trees are all kept equal
By hatchet,
Axe,
And saw ...

The Trees by Rush
Album: Hemispheres
Date: 1978
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y3G5LALx4qc

Natural Science from Permanent Waves 1980

[1. Tide Pools]

When the ebbing tide retreats
Along the rocky shoreline
It leaves a trail of tidal pools
In a short-lived galaxy
Each microcosmic planet
A complete society

A simple kind mirror
To reflect upon our own
All the busy little creatures
Chasing out their destinies
Living in their pools
They soon forget about the sea...

Wheels within wheels in a spiral array
A pattern so grand and complex
Time after time we lose sight of the way
Our causes can't see their effects

[2. Hyperspace]

A quantum leap forward
In time and in space
The universe learned to expand

The mess and the magic
Triumphant and tragic
A mechanized world out of hand

Computerized clinic
For superior cynics
Who dance to a synthetic band

In their own image
Their world is fashioned
No wonder they don't understand

[3. Permanent Waves]

Science, like nature
Must also be tamed
With a view towards its preservation
Given the same
State of integrity
It will surely serve us well

Art as expression
Not as market campaigns
Will still capture our imaginations
Given the same
State of integrity
It will surely help us along

The most endangered species
The honest man
Will still survive annihilation
Forming a world
State of integrity
Sensitive, open and strong

Wave after wave will flow with the tide
And bury the world as it does
Tide after tide will flow and recede
Leaving life to go on as it was...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8G9e6kFy5-E

I get up at seven, yeah
And I go to work at nine
I got no time for livin
Yes, Im workin all the time

It seems to me
I could live my life
A lot better than I think I am
I guess thats why they call me
They call me the workin man

They call me the workin man
I guess thats what I am

I get home at five oclock
And I take myself out a nice, cold beer
Always seem to be wondrin
Why theres nothin goin down here

It seems to me
I could live my life
A lot better than I think I am
I guess thats why they call me
They call me the workin man

They call me the workin man
I guess thats what I am

Well they call me the workin man
I guess thats what I am
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ztv8lsgpmmI

I guess that's what I am.

But it's only lately that I have begun to guess...

Journalist, revolutionary, philospher, materialist, the prototype “nihlist”, Pisarev spent most of his life in prison (without ever being charged) and died, in mysterious circumstances, immediately after his release at the obscene age of 28.[/i]

Why'd he get jailed? Or, rather, what specific events led to his jailing? I think we all can easily deduce the 'why' of it.

Does Marx mention Pisarev as an influence in any way?

What's is this guy's major contribution, aside from the sheer volume of his short life's work?

Journalist, revolutionary, philospher, materialist, the prototype “nihlist”, Pisarev spent most of his life in prison (without ever being charged) and died, in mysterious circumstances, immediately after his release at the obscene age of 28.[/i]

Why'd he get jailed? Or, rather, what specific events led to his jailing? I think we all can easily deduce the 'why' of it.

Does Marx mention Pisarev as an influence in any way?

What's is this guy's major contribution, aside from the sheer volume of his short life's work?

Those are very good questions.

Give me a bit to try to answer them (I don't know the specific charges... I'm not sure there were any but I read somewhere that he had risen to the defence of Chernyshevsky who was thrown in prison in 1862, when Pisarev was 22).

I'll take a stab at the others...

Journalist, revolutionary, philospher, materialist, the prototype “nihlist”, Pisarev spent most of his life in prison (without ever being charged) and died, in mysterious circumstances, immediately after his release at the obscene age of 28.[/i]

Why'd he get jailed? Or, rather, what specific events led to his jailing? I think we all can easily deduce the 'why' of it.

Does Marx mention Pisarev as an influence in any way?

What's is this guy's major contribution, aside from the sheer volume of his short life's work?

These are two very serious questions of which the second has much more profound and timely implications. Let me get the first question out of the way. There are a couple of "begats" between Marx and Pisarev. Pisarev was a "student" and supporter of Chernyshevsky who was more than a decade his senior. The impact of Chernyshevsky's novel, What is to be Done on Russian radicalism cannot be overstated.

Neither Chernyshevsky nor Pisarev seems to have known much about Marx, as Engels explains in the long passage below. In fact, apart from the Russian emigres in Western Europe, Marx seems to have been thought of as a "theoritician" and "economist", in comparison to Bakunin, the "man of action". In fact, it wasn't until the utter defeat of the narodniks (we'll get to them) that a general re-think in the Russian movement brought it to Marxism. Chernyshevsky sat at the nexus of that transformation. On the one hand, he had a large popular following and was the "father" of narodnism; on the other, Chernyshevsky's real importance was as an "adamant materialist" (as the Catholic Church calls him) and theoritician, as was also true of Pisarev.

Marx was a huge fan of Chernyshevsky, writing at one point that he had learned Russian for the express purpose of reading him. On several occasions, Marx and Engels compared Chernyshevsky to Lessing and Diderot. This is high praise indeed as those two were hugely important to the development of the materialist doctrine which fueled the Democratic revolutions in Europe and America. The basic idea was that Chernyshevsky (and through him, Pisarev) were independently developing the materialist and therefore, revolutionary, perspective which would in turn drive the Russian revolutionary movement (yes... "theory" was not just an important thing; it was the thing without which, nothing else "happened"). Chernyshevsky (and Pisarev and others) substituted for the sticky sentimentality of the bankrupt Russian liberals, the silly religious mysticism of the Russian middle classes, and the utter depression of the great and noble , but dead-end Russian literature, a hard-nosed, hard-edged, ultra scientific and ultra critical view of the impossibility of "reform" within the Russian society... a view that was only hardened by the dungeons of the Peter and Paul Fortress. In the people, these "new" Russians saw, not just oppression and misery, but the motive force to change everything... the sea in which to swim when all else was hopeless.


Capital[/b], Karl Marx]The Continental revolution of 1848-9 also had its reaction in England. Men who still claimed some scientific standing and aspired to be something more than mere sophists and sycophants of the ruling-classes tried to harmonise the Political Economy of capital with the claims, no longer to be ignored, of the proletariat. Hence a shallow syncretism of which John Stuart Mill is the best representative. It is a declaration of bankruptcy by bourgeois economy, an event on which the great Russian scholar and critic, N. Tschernyschewsky, has thrown the light of a master mind in his “Outlines of Political Economy according to Mill.”


Otyecestvenniye Zapisky[/i] in 1877, Karl Marx]In the postcript to the second German edition of Capital – which the author of the article on M. Shukovsky knows, because he quotes it – I speak of “a great Russian critic and man of learning” with the high consideration he deserves. In his remarkable articles this writer has dealt with the question whether, as her liberal economists maintain, Russia must begin by destroying la commune rurale (the village commune) in order to pass to the capitalist regime, or whether, on the contrary, she can without experiencing the tortures of this regime appropriate all its fruits by developing ses propres donnees historiques [the particular historic conditions already given her]. He pronounces in favour of this latter solution. And my honourable critic would have had at least as much reason for inferring from my consideration for this “great Russian critic and man of learning” that I shared his views on the question, as for concluding from my polemic against the “literary man” and Pan-Slavist that I rejected them.

In addition, Marx hoped that some of Chernyshevsky's theories on revolution in Russia based on peasant property held in common, had a chance to bypass the conventional development of capitalism altogether... within a window that was unfortunately short and closing fast. Forgive me for quoting Engels at length:


On Social Relations In Russia[/b] (1894), Engels]Herzen’s successor Tkachov made it just as easy for himself as his master. Although he could no longer maintain in 1875 that the “social question” in Russia had already been solved, according to him the Russian peasants — as born communists — are infinitely closer to socialism than the poor, god-forsaken West European proletarians, and are infinitely better off into the bargain. When, on the strength of a hundred-year-old revolutionary tradition, French republicans consider their people to be the chosen people from a political point of view, many Russian socialists of the day declared that Russia was socially the chosen nation; the rebirth of the old economic world would, they thought, spring not from the struggles of the West European proletariat but from the innermost interior of the Russian peasant. My attack was directed at this childish view.

But now the Russian commune had also found respect and recognition among people of infinitely greater stature than the Herzens and Tkachovs. They included Nikolai Chernyshevsky, that great thinker to whom Russia owes such a boundless debt and whose slow murder through years of exile among Siberian Yakuts will remain an eternal disgrace on the memory of Alexander II the “Liberator”.

Owing to the Russian intellectual embargo Chernyshevsky never knew the works of Marx, and when Capital appeared he had long been captive in Sredne-Vilyuisk among the Yakuts. His entire intellectual development had to take place within the surrounding medium created by this intellectual embargo. What Russian censorship would not let in scarcely existed for Russia, if at all. If there are sporadic weaknesses, sporadic instances of a limited outlook, then one can only feel admiration that there are not more of them.

Chernyshevsky, too, sees in the Russian peasant commune a means of progressing from the existing form of society to a new stage of development, higher than both the Russian commune on the one hand, and West European capitalist society with its class antagonisms on the other. And he sees a mark of superiority in the fact that Russia possesses this means, whereas the West does not.

“The introduction of a better order of things is greatly hindered in Western Europe by the boundless extension of the rights of the individual ... it is not easy to renounce even a negligible portion of what one is used to enjoying, and in the West the individual is used to unlimited private rights. The usefulness and necessity of mutual concessions can he learned only by bitter experience and prolonged thought. In the West, a better system of economic relations is bound up with sacrifices, and that is why it is difficult to establish. It runs counter to the habits of the English and French peasants.” But “what seems a utopia in one country exists as a fact in another ... habits which the Englishman and the Frenchman find immensely difficult to introduce into their national life exist in fact in the national life of the Russians.... The order of things for which the West is now striving by such a difficult and long road still exists in our country in the mighty national customs of our village life ... We see what deplorable consequences resulted in the West from the loss of communal land tenure and how difficult it is to give back to the Western peoples what they have lost. The example of the West must not be lost on us” (Chernyshevsky, Works, Geneva edition, Vol. V, pp. 16-19, quoted by Plekhanov, “Nasi raznoglasija”, Geneva, 1885, [16-17])

And of the Ural Cossacks, who still retained communal tilling of the soil and subsequent distribution of the produce among individual families, he says:

“If the people of the Urals live under their present system to see machines introduced into corn-growing, they will be very glad of having retained a system which allows the use of machines that require big-scale farming embracing hundreds of dessiatines” (ibid., p. 131).

It should not be forgotten, however, that the people of the Urals with their communal tilling — saved from extinction by military considerations (we also have barrack-room communism) — stand alone in Russia, more or less like the farmstead communities on the Mosel back home with their periodic redistributions. And if they adhere to their present system until they are ready for the introduction of machinery, it will not be they who profit from it, but the Russian military exchequer whose slaves they are.

At any rate, it was a fact: at the same time as capitalist society was disintegrating and threatening to founder on the necessary contradictions of its own development, half of the entire cultivated land in Russia was still the common property of the peasant communes. Now, if in the West the resolution of the contradictions by a reorganisation of society is conditional on the conversion of all the means of production, hence of the land too, into the common property of society, how does the already, or rather still, existing common property in Russia relate to this common property in the West, which still has to be created? Can it not serve as a point of departure for a national campaign which, skipping the entire capitalist period, will convert Russian peasant communism straight into modern socialist common ownership of the means of production by enriching it with all the technical achievements of the capitalist era? Or, to use the words with which Marx sums up the views of Chernyshevsky in a letter to be quoted below: “Should Russia first destroy the rural commune, as demanded by the liberals, in order to go over to the capitalist system, or can it on the contrary acquire all the fruits of this system, without suffering its torments, by developing its own historical conditions?”

The very way in which the question is posed indicates the direction in which the answer should be sought. The Russian commune has existed for hundreds of years without ever providing the impetus for the development of a higher form of common ownership out of itself; no more so than in the case of the German Mark system, the Celtic clans, the Indian and other communes with primitive, communistic institutions. In the course of time, under the influence of commodity production surrounding them, or arising in their own midst and gradually pervading them, and of the exchange between individual families and individual persons, they all lost more and more of their communistic character and dissolved into communities of mutually independent landowners. So if the question of whether the Russian commune will enjoy a different and better fate may be raised at all, then this is not through any fault of its own, but solely due to the fact that it has survived in a European country in a relatively vigorous form into an age when not only commodity production as such, but even its highest and ultimate form, capitalist production, has come into conflict in Western Europe with the productive forces it has created itself; when it is proving incapable of continuing to direct these forces; and when it is foundering on these innate contradictions and the class conflicts that go along with them. It is quite evident from this alone that the initiative for any possible transformation of the Russian commune along these lines cannot come from the commune itself, but only from the industrial proletarians of the West. The victory of the West European proletariat over the bourgeoisie, and, linked to this, the replacement of capitalist production by socially managed production — that is the necessary precondition for raising the Russian commune to the same level.

The fact is: at no time or place has the agrarian communism that arose out of gentile society developed anything of its own accord but its own disintegration. As early as 1861 the Russian peasant commune itself was a relatively weakened form of this communism; the common tilling of the land which survived in some parts of India and in the South Slav household community (zádruga), the probable mother of the Russian commune, had been forced to give way to cultivation by individual families; common ownership only continued to manifest itself in the redistribution of land which took place at greatly varying intervals according to the different localities. This redistribution needs only to lapse or be abolished by decree, and the village of allotment peasants is a fait accompli.

But the mere fact that alongside the Russian peasant commune capitalist production in Western Europe is simultaneously approaching the point where it breaks down and where it points itself to a new form of production in which the means of production are employed in a planned manner as social property — this mere fact cannot endow the Russian commune with the power to develop this new form of society out of itself. How could it appropriate the colossal productive forces of capitalist society as social property and a social tool even before capitalist society itself has accomplished this revolution; how could the Russian commune show the world how to run large-scale industry for the common benefit, when it has already forgotten how to till its land for the common benefit?

Certainly, there are enough people in Russia who are quite familiar with Western capitalist society with all its irreconcilable antagonisms and conflicts and are also clear about the way out of this apparent dead-end. But firstly, the few thousand people who realise this do not live in the commune, and the fifty million or so in Great Russia who still live with common ownership of the land have not the faintest idea of all this. They are at least as alien and unsympathetic to these few thousand as the English proletarians from 1800 to 1840 with regard to the plans which Robert Owen devised for their salvation. And, of the workmen whom Owen employed in his factory in New Lanark, the majority likewise consisted of people who had been raised on the institutions and customs of a decaying communistic gentile society, the Celtic-Scottish clan; but nowhere does he so much as hint that they showed a greater appreciation of his ideas. And secondly, it is an historical impossibility that a lower stage of economic development should solve the enigmas and conflicts which did not arise, and could not arise, until a far higher stage. All forms of gentile community which arose before commodity production and individual exchange have one thing in common with the future socialist society: that certain things, means of production, are subject to the common ownership and the common use of certain groups. This one shared feature does not, however, enable the lower form of society to engender out of itself the future socialist society, this final and most intrinsic product of capitalism. Any given economic formation has its own problems to solve, problems arising out of itself; to seek to solve those of another, utterly alien formation would be absolutely absurd. And this applies to the Russian commune no less than to the South Slav zádruga, the Indian gentile economy or any other savage or barbaric form of society characterised by the common ownership of the means of production.

On the other hand, it is not only possible but certain that after the victory of the proletariat and the transfer of the means of production into common ownership among the West European peoples, the countries which have only just succumbed to capitalist production and have salvaged gentile institutions, or remnants thereof, have in these remnants of common ownership and in the corresponding popular customs a powerful means of appreciably shortening the process of development into a socialist society and of sparing themselves most of the suffering and struggles through which we in Western Europe must work our way. But the example and the active assistance of the hitherto capitalist West is an indispensable condition for this. Only when the capitalist economy has been relegated to the history books in its homeland and in the countries where it flourished, only when the backward countries see from this example “how it’s done”, how the productive forces of modern industry are placed in the service of all as social property — only then can they tackle this shortened process of development. But then success will be assured. And this is true of all countries in the pre-capitalist stage, not only Russia. It will be easiest — comparatively speaking — in Russia, however, because there a section of the indigenous population has already assimilated the intellectual results of capitalist development, thereby making it possible in revolutionary times to accomplish the social transformation more or less simultaneously with the West.

This was stated by Marx and me as long ago as January 21, 1882 in the preface to Plekhanov’s Russian translation of the Communist Manifesto. The passage reads:

“Alongside a rapidly developing capitalist swindle and bourgeois landed property which is only just in the process of formation, in Russia we find the greater part of the land in the common ownership of the peasants. Now the question is: can the Russian commune, this form of the original common ownership of land which is actually already in a state of severe disintegration, make the direct transition into a higher communist form of landed property — or must it first undergo the same process of dissolution that characterises the historical development of the West? The only possible answer to this question today is as follows: when the Russian revolution gives the signal for a workers’ revolution in the West, so that each complements the other, then Russian landed property might become the starting point for a communist development.”

It should not be forgotten, however, that the considerable disintegration of Russian common property mentioned above has since advanced significantly. The defeats of the Crimean War had exposed Russia’s need for rapid industrial development. Above all railways were needed, and these are not possible on a broad footing without large-scale domestic industry. The precondition for this was the so-called emancipation of the serfs; it marked the beginning of the capitalist era in Russia; but hence also the era of the rapid destruction of the common ownership of land. The redemption payments imposed on the peasants, together with increased taxes and the simultaneous reduction and deterioration of the land allotted to them, inevitably forced them into the hands of usurers, chiefly members of the peasant commune who had grown rich. The railways opened up for hitherto remote areas a market for their grain, but they also brought the cheap products of large-scale industry to them, thereby killing off the cottage industry of the peasants, who had previously manufactured similar goods partly for their own use and partly for sale. The traditional conditions of employment were thrown into confusion; there followed the breakdown which everywhere accompanies the transition from a subsistence economy to a “money economy” within the commune large differences in wealth appeared between the members — debt turned the poorer into the slaves of the rich. In short, the same process that had caused the Athenian gens to break down in the period before Solon, with the advent of the money economy, now began to break down the Russian commune. Solon was able to liberate the slaves of debt, it is true, by means of a revolutionary intervention in the then still fairly recent law of private property by simply annulling the debts. But he could not revitalise the old Athenian gens, any more than any power in the world will be able to restore the Russian commune once its breakdown has reached a certain point. And to cap it all the Russian Government has forbidden redistribution of land among the members of the commune more frequently than every twelve years, so that the peasant should grow increasingly unaccustomed to it and start to think of himself as the private owner of his share.

This was the tenor of Marx’s comments in a letter to Russia which he wrote back in 1877. [Letter to Otechestvenniye Zapiski] A certain Mr. Zhukovsky, the same man who as head cashier of the State Bank now lends his signature to Russian credit notes, had written something about Marx in the European Herald (Vestnik Yevropy), to which another writer had replied in the National Records (Otechestvenniye Zapiski). In order to correct this article Marx wrote a letter to the editor of the Records, which, after copies of the French original had long been circulating in Russia, appeared in Russian translation in the Herald of the People’s Will (Vestnik Narodnoi Voli) in 1886 in Geneva and later in Russia itself. Like everything that emanated from Marx, this letter attracted a good deal of attention and varying interpretations in Russian circles, and I therefore present its gist here.

First, Marx repudiates the view attributed to him in the Records that he shared the opinion of the Russian liberals, according to which nothing was more urgent for Russia than to destroy the communal property of the peasants and plunge headlong into capitalism. His short note on Herzen in the appendix to the first edition of Capital proves nothing. This note reads:

“If the influence of capitalist production, which is undermining the human race ... continues to develop on the continent of Europe as hitherto, hand in hand with competition in the size of national soldiery, national debts, taxes, elegant means of warfare, etc., the rejuvenation of Europe by the knout and the obligatory infusion of Kalmuck blood so earnestly prophesied by the half-Russian and whole-Muscovite Herzen (this literary man did not, incidentally, make his discoveries in the field of “Russian communism” in Russia but in the work of the Prussian privy councillor Haxthausen) might eventually become inevitable” (Capital, I, first edition, p. 763).

Marx then continues:

This passage “can under no circumstances provide the key to my opinion of the efforts” (the following is quoted in Russian in the original) “of Russian men to find a course of development for their native country which differs from that which Western Europe has followed and is still following” etc. — In the Afterword to the second German edition of Capital, I speak of a ‘great Russian scholar and critic’” (Chernyshevsky) “with the high esteem which he deserves. In his noteworthy articles the latter dealt with the question whether Russia should start, as its liberal economists demand, by destroying the rural commune in order to go over to a capitalist system, or whether, on the contrary, it can acquire all the fruits of this system, without suffering its torments, by developing its own historical conditions. He comes out in favour of the second solution.

“Be that as it may, as I do not like to leave anything to ‘guesswork’ I will speak straight out. In order to be able to assess Russia’s economic development from the position of an expert, I learned Russian and then spent several long years studying official publications and others with a bearing on this subject. I have arrived at this result: if Russia continues along the path it has followed since 1861, it will miss the finest chance that history has ever offered a nation, only to undergo all the fatal vicissitudes of the capitalist system.”

Marx goes on to clear up a number of other misunderstandings on the part of his critic; the only passage relating to the matter in question reads:

“Now, in what way was my critic able to apply this historical sketch to Russia?” (The account of primitive accumulation in Capital) “Only this: if Russia is tending to become a capitalist nation, on the model of the countries of Western Europe,— and in recent years it has gone to great pains to move in this direction — it will not succeed without having first transformed a large proportion of its peasants into proletarians; and after that, once it has been placed in the bosom of the capitalist system, it will be subjected to its pitiless laws, like other profane peoples. That is all.”

Thus wrote Marx in 1877. At that time there were two governments in Russia: the Tsar’s and that of the secret executive committee (ispolnitel'nyj komitet) of the terrorist conspirators. The power of this secret second government grew daily. The fall of tsardom seemed imminent; a revolution in Russia was bound to deprive the entire forces of European reaction of its mainstay, its great reserve army, and thus give the political movement of the West a mighty new impulse and, what is more, infinitely more favourable conditions in which to operate. No wonder that Marx advises the Russians to be in less of a hurry to make the leap into capitalism.

The Russian revolution did not come. Tsardom got the better of terrorism, which even managed to drive all the propertied, “law-abiding” classes back into its arms for the time being. And in the seventeen years which have elapsed since that letter was written both capitalism and the dissolution of the peasant commune have made tremendous headway in Russia. So how do matters stand today, in 1894?

When the old tsarist despotism continued unchanged after the defeats of the Crimean War and the suicide of Tsar Nicholas, only one road was open: the swiftest transition possible to capitalist industry. The army had been destroyed by the gigantic dimensions of the empire, on the long marches to the theatre of war; the distances had to be nullified by a strategic railway network. But railways mean capitalist industry and the revolutionising of primitive agriculture. For one thing, the agricultural produce of even the remotest areas is brought into direct contact with the world market; for another, an extensive railway system cannot be constructed and kept working without domestic industry to supply rails, locomotives, rolling stock, etc. But it is not possible to introduce one branch of large-scale industry without accepting the entire system; the textile industry on a relatively modern footing, which had already taken root both in the region of Moscow and Vladimir and on the Baltic coasts, received fresh impetus. The railways and factories were accompanied by the expansion of existing banks and the establishment of new ones; the emancipation of the peasants from serfdom instituted freedom of movement, in anticipation of the ensuing automatic emancipation of a large proportion of these peasants from landownership too. Thus in a short while all the foundations of the capitalist mode of production were laid in Russia. But the axe had also been taken to the root of the Russian peasant commune.

Lemme catch a breath and I'll take a stab at the more important question... "Why is Pisarev important?"

.

On several occasions, Marx and Engels compared Chernyshevsky to Lessing and Diderot. This is high praise indeed as those two were hugely important to the development of the materialist doctrine which fueled the Democratic revolutions in Europe and America.

Ok, well that's some more trotting off to wikipedia for some biographical background I suppose. But really, a brief explanation of the materialist doctrine as relates to the more familiar, and perhaps to many also more relevant, western European and American revolutions may well be worth directing interested parties to.


Chernyshevsky (and through him, Pisarev) were independently developing the materialist and therefore, revolutionary, perspective which would in turn drive the Russian revolutionary movement (yes... "theory" was not just an important thing; it was the thing without which, nothing else "happened"). Chernyshevsky (and Pisarev and others) substituted for the sticky sentimentality of the bankrupt Russian liberals, the silly religious mysticism of the Russian middle classes, and the utter depression of the great and noble , but dead-end Russian literature, a hard-nosed, hard-edged, ultra scientific and ultra critical view of the impossibility of "reform" within the Russian society... a view that was only hardened by the dungeons of the Peter and Paul Fortress. In the people, these "new" Russians saw, not just oppression and misery, but the motive force to change everything... the sea in which to swim when all else was hopeless.

The flashbacks that good teachers always induce. Thanks, anax!




Peter and Paul Fortress

http://www.baltexpress.ru/musgal/ppf/scheme.jpg


In Russian and French Prisons[/b], Petr Alekseevich Kropotkin]
The fortress covers more than 300 acres with its six bastions and six courtines, two ravelins, and the wide red-brick cronwerk erected by Nicholas I. on the north. It has, within its enclosure, plenty of all kinds of accommodation for all kinds of prisoners. Nobody, except the commander of the place, knows all of them.

There is a lofty three-storied building, which once obtained the nickname of “St. Petersburg Imperial University,” because hundreds of students were marched there, between two files of bayonets, after the disorders at the University in 1861. Scores of young men were kept there for months before they were transported to “more or less remote provinces of the Empire,” and saw their scientific career destroyed for ever by this “measure of the Emperor’s clemency.”

There is again the Courtine of Catherine which faces the Neva, under whose wide embrasures graceful flowering bushes grow at the foot of the granite walls, between two bastions. It is there that Tchernyshevsky wrote in 1864 his remarkable novel “What is to be done?” which is just now stirring the hearts of the Socialist youth of American, and in Russia made a revolution in the relations of the students and the women who were striving for their right to knowledge. From the depth of a casemate in the Courtine, Tchernyshevsky taught the young men to see in woman a comrade and a friend – not a domestic slave – and his lesson has borne its fruits.

It was there again that, a few years later, Dimitri Pissareff was imprisoned for having taken up the same noble work. Compelled to abandon it in the fortress, he did not lie idle: he wrote his remarkable analysis of the “Origin of the Species,” one of the most popular, and surely the most attractive ever penned. Two great talents were thus destroyed precisely as they were reaching their full growth. Tchernyshevsky was sent to Siberia, where he was kept for twenty years, in the mines first, and then, for thirteen years, in Viluisk, a hamlet of a few houses situated on the confines of the Arctic region. A petition for release, signed by an International Literary Congress, produced no effect. The Autocrat was so much afraid of the influence Tchernyshevsky might enjoy in Russia, that he permitted him to return from Siberia and to be settled at Astrakhan, only when he had no more to fear from his noble pen: when the writer was a ruin after a twenty years’ life of privation and sufferings among semi-savages. There was a simulacrum of judgment passed upon Tchernyshevsky; his writings, all of which had passed through the hands of the Censorship, his novel written in the fortress, were brought forward as so many proofs of guilt before the Senate. Pissareff was not even brought before a court: he was merely kept in the fortress until reported harmless…He was drowned a few months after his release.

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http://www.populistindependent.org/phpb ... =1286#1286 (http://www.populistindependent.org/phpbb/viewtopic.php?p=1286#1286)


"Theory is not just an important thing; it is the thing without which nothing else happens."

Fair to say? True now as ever? Seems to me, now more than ever, the universal agreement we all should strive for is in our estimation of how to analyze the situation we are in and the history that has brought us here. That 'hard-edged, ultra scientific and ultra critical view.' From there, in the bright light of truth, we can get down to burning the constitution or whatever. Just kidding. Well. Not really.

Once you pull the words I stuffed in your mouth out, spit some of your own on this matter, if it pleez ya.

I want also to zero in on this:



On Social Relations In Russia[/b] (1894), Engels]
...Chernyshevsky, too, sees in the Russian peasant commune a means of progressing from the existing form of society to a new stage of development, higher than both the Russian commune on the one hand, and West European capitalist society with its class antagonisms on the other. And he sees a mark of superiority in the fact that Russia possesses this means, whereas the West does not.

“The introduction of a better order of things is greatly hindered in Western Europe by the boundless extension of the rights of the individual ... it is not easy to renounce even a negligible portion of what one is used to enjoying, and in the West the individual is used to unlimited private rights. The usefulness and necessity of mutual concessions can he learned only by bitter experience and prolonged thought. In the West, a better system of economic relations is bound up with sacrifices, and that is why it is difficult to establish. It runs counter to the habits of the English and French peasants.” But “what seems a utopia in one country exists as a fact in another ... habits which the Englishman and the Frenchman find immensely difficult to introduce into their national life exist in fact in the national life of the Russians.... The order of things for which the West is now striving by such a difficult and long road still exists in our country in the mighty national customs of our village life ... We see what deplorable consequences resulted in the West from the loss of communal land tenure and how difficult it is to give back to the Western peoples what they have lost. The example of the West must not be lost on us” (Chernyshevsky, Works, Geneva edition, Vol. V, pp. 16-19, quoted by Plekhanov, “Nasi raznoglasija”, Geneva, 1885, [16-17])

A couple of months ago I posted here a Marx quote that has really stuck with me


It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness.

Strangely, it seems that is not often the the line in that paragraph that gets the CntrlB treatment, but for me it is the kernal of the rest. Sometime, I'll hafta try to make hay of the whole paragraph, maybe even read the piece. But in the meantime, I am trying to connect the dots, the very highest peaks of the most impacting and accurate philosophers. I think it is important to give some structure to the ideas I have had roaming around in my head, ideas about that cold hard look at the truth... It is interesting to me that I zeroed in on Pisarev having already, foggily and otherwise glommed onto materialism, a term I still struggle to define even as I grasp its importance as a starting place for everything else.



On Social Relations In Russia[/b] (1894), Engels]Marx sums up the views of Chernyshevsky in a letter to be quoted below: “Should Russia first destroy the rural commune, as demanded by the liberals, in order to go over to the capitalist system, or can it on the contrary acquire all the fruits of this system, without suffering its torments, by developing its own historical conditions?”

The very way in which the question is posed indicates the direction in which the answer should be sought. The Russian commune has existed for hundreds of years without ever providing the impetus for the development of a higher form of common ownership out of itself; no more so than in the case of the German Mark system, the Celtic clans, the Indian and other communes with primitive, communistic institutions. In the course of time, under the influence of commodity production surrounding them, or arising in their own midst and gradually pervading them, and of the exchange between individual families and individual persons, they all lost more and more of their communistic character and dissolved into communities of mutually independent landowners. So if the question of whether the Russian commune will enjoy a different and better fate may be raised at all, then this is not through any fault of its own, but solely due to the fact that it has survived in a European country in a relatively vigorous form into an age when not only commodity production as such, but even its highest and ultimate form, capitalist production, has come into conflict in Western Europe with the productive forces it has created itself; when it is proving incapable of continuing to direct these forces; and when it is foundering on these innate contradictions and the class conflicts that go along with them. It is quite evident from this alone that the initiative for any possible transformation of the Russian commune along these lines cannot come from the commune itself, but only from the industrial proletarians of the West. The victory of the West European proletariat over the bourgeoisie, and, linked to this, the replacement of capitalist production by socially managed production — that is the necessary precondition for raising the Russian commune to the same level.

Strikes me as important stuff, that does. In one way, it shows the guys' hewing to the idea of historical progression we all hear so much about, and given this bit of further explications, some practical reasons why. Of further intrigue to me is what this all means given that these ideas came before the revolution in Russia and, more importantly vis capitalism, globalization.

Given my impression above, this was most interesting...


On Social Relations In Russia[/b] (1894), Engels]
Only when the capitalist economy has been relegated to the history books in its homeland and in the countries where it flourished, only when the backward countries see from this example “how it’s done”, how the productive forces of modern industry are placed in the service of all as social property — only then can they tackle this shortened process of development. But then success will be assured. And this is true of all countries in the pre-capitalist stage, not only Russia. It will be easiest — comparatively speaking — in Russia, however, because there a section of the indigenous population has already assimilated the intellectual results of capitalist development, thereby making it possible in revolutionary times to accomplish the social transformation more or less simultaneously with the West.

This was stated by Marx and me as long ago as January 21, 1882 in the preface to Plekhanov’s Russian translation of the Communist Manifesto. The passage reads:

“Alongside a rapidly developing capitalist swindle and bourgeois landed property which is only just in the process of formation, in Russia we find the greater part of the land in the common ownership of the peasants. Now the question is: can the Russian commune, this form of the original common ownership of land which is actually already in a state of severe disintegration, make the direct transition into a higher communist form of landed property — or must it first undergo the same process of dissolution that characterises the historical development of the West? The only possible answer to this question today is as follows: when the Russian revolution gives the signal for a workers’ revolution in the West, so that each complements the other, then Russian landed property might become the starting point for a communist development.”

Since then, one indisputable fact is that a huge number of people around the world have 'assimilated the intellectual results of capitalist development.'

http://i29.photobucket.com/albums/c297/rustyfeasel/iraq_mcdonalds.jpg

Despite that favorite pedestrian talking point about there never having been two countries with a McDonald's at war with one another, one can rightly ask whether the Latin America of today, or the Africa of tomorrow, will be the analogue to the spur for international liberation that Marx and Engels posited the Russian revolution coulda and shoulda been?

Further, but alas without citation, I recall there having been a mention by one of these thinkers that there was a problem in the Russian communes because the people do not even know what it is we are thinking about. That certainly rings familiar.

As I said above, there is one cure and one place for broad agreement, and that is in taking the materialist view. So thanks for the grounding that bolsters my developing impressions about this. I look forward to reading more of Pisarev, both here at pop indy and at home.

"Theory is not just an important thing; it is the thing without which nothing else happens."

Fair to say? True now as ever? Seems to me, now more than ever, the universal agreement we all should strive for is in our estimation of how to analyze the situation we are in and the history that has brought us here. That 'hard-edged, ultra scientific and ultra critical view.' From there, in the bright light of truth, we can get down to burning the constitution or whatever. Just kidding. Well. Not really.

Once you pull the words I stuffed in your mouth out, spit some of your own on this matter, if it pleez ya.

Hmmm.... In some ways this is all I ever write about. Still, it's hard to say it directly. Yes, you are right, but that "view" has a name ("materialism") and it was the same for Diderot as it was for Pisarev and as it was for Marx (though the evolution certainly matters).

...but the objective is not "truth" in the abstract. It is more in the form of "truth" as a weapon. To spit out a platitude: "…we are the only ones who have nothing to fear, and everything to gain, from the 'truth'".

Hang on a bit... maybe I can say this in a way that doesn’t sound so lame.


I want also to zero in on this:



On Social Relations In Russia[/b] (1894), Engels]
...Chernyshevsky, too, sees in the Russian peasant commune a means of progressing from the existing form of society to a new stage of development, higher than both the Russian commune on the one hand, and West European capitalist society with its class antagonisms on the other. And he sees a mark of superiority in the fact that Russia possesses this means, whereas the West does not.

“The introduction of a better order of things is greatly hindered in Western Europe by the boundless extension of the rights of the individual ... it is not easy to renounce even a negligible portion of what one is used to enjoying, and in the West the individual is used to unlimited private rights. The usefulness and necessity of mutual concessions can he learned only by bitter experience and prolonged thought. In the West, a better system of economic relations is bound up with sacrifices, and that is why it is difficult to establish. It runs counter to the habits of the English and French peasants.” But “what seems a utopia in one country exists as a fact in another ... habits which the Englishman and the Frenchman find immensely difficult to introduce into their national life exist in fact in the national life of the Russians.... The order of things for which the West is now striving by such a difficult and long road still exists in our country in the mighty national customs of our village life ... We see what deplorable consequences resulted in the West from the loss of communal land tenure and how difficult it is to give back to the Western peoples what they have lost. The example of the West must not be lost on us” (Chernyshevsky, Works, Geneva edition, Vol. V, pp. 16-19, quoted by Plekhanov, “Nasi raznoglasija”, Geneva, 1885, [16-17])

This one is simple as are the references to the same thing in your other Engels quotes. Rural property in Russia was held largely in common. There was a theory that this communal form (the "mir") was ready made "communism" and all that had to be done was to inform the peasants of it and simply pass into the new society by incorporating what already existed. This view was held by Herzen, Bakunin, and most of the narodniks at one time. The theory failed spectacularly as the reactionary character of the "mir" became clearer in the last half of the 19th century, after the emancipation of the serfs in 1861 (I'll try to give a short summary of this when I answer your second question).

Chernshevsky (and Marx and Engels and Pisarev) rejected this view but also saw communal property as an opportunity. In Western Europe, the final defeat of feudalism had led to the breakup of the large estates and the creation of a very large class of small proprietors in place of the previous peasantry. Each of these was a small holder, a tiny bourgeois (or petite-bourgeois - "pettys" in the vernacular I know) who immediately embraced the sum total of the political program (property rights) of the bourgeoisie and became the basis for an intense rural conservatism that put a damper on European social movements for 50 to 100 years. The question was whether social revolution could not transform communal property directly into social property without the intervening step of the creation and subsequent destruction of independent small holders.

The issue became moot in Russia very quickly, as Engels points out, when capitalist development destroyed communal property at record speed. Only a little bit slower was the European competition which destroyed the small holders just as easily as it had created them and despite their protestations of loyalty to every reactionary doctrine from French restoration to Prussian militarism.

Here’s a thought for you: in some ways, that peculiar petty perspective lasted the longest in the U.S. where immigration fed the recycled surplus of the expropriated small holders not just into the growing cities but into Western “expansion” based on “free land”. Thus, for many generations, the destruction of small property was cancelled out (politically, at least) by the “creation” of the new, only to repeat the cycle once again. Figuratively, only the Pacific Ocean put an end to the racket.


A couple of months ago I posted here a Marx quote that has really stuck with me


It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness.

Strangely, it seems that is not often the the line in that paragraph that gets the CntrlB treatment, but for me it is the kernal of the rest. Sometime, I'll hafta try to make hay of the whole paragraph, maybe even read the piece. But in the meantime, I am trying to connect the dots, the very highest peaks of the most impacting and accurate philosophers. I think it is important to give some structure to the ideas I have had roaming around in my head, ideas about that cold hard look at the truth... It is interesting to me that I zeroed in on Pisarev having already, foggily and otherwise glommed onto materialism, a term I still struggle to define even as I grasp its importance as a starting place for everything else.


Yup… that’s it.

And it is obvious if you think about it…

So, obvious in fact, that we are led to a whole raft of new questions…

Which means more than the paragraph or the piece… somethin’ like a lifetime of readin’ (and doin’).

“But in the meantime, I am trying to connect the dots, the very highest peaks of the most impacting and accurate philosophers.”

Marx has a famous quote that says that “philosophy died with Hegel”. Equally famous is “philosophers have tried to understand the world; the point is to change it” (paraphrase).

It’s not exactly “philosophy” we are talking about, as in the sense of understanding “thinking” or “the meaning of life”. It is more on the order of “full-contact-philosophy” or philosophy (or economics, etc.) as a martial art.

Pisarev was a literary critic. Bees ends abruptly because the censors destroyed the ending and the original manuscript was lost. You might think that they could have “lightened up”.

Later, when 3 very dangerous young narodnik leaders abandoned terrorism and “action” to start writing about “philosophy” in obscure journals, the Tsarist secret police were initially overjoyed. In very short order, the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party was born in long, arcane “theoretical” discussions. From there to the Russian revolution was only a hop, skip and a jump.

I’ll try to get to it all and, at least give you a few places to look.

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Think about political discussion (and politics is always a "discussion"). Think about it in either the narrow terms of the "left" websites you visit or in the larger sense of politics in America, as a whole. What is the basis... the most fundamental basis ... for debate? What is the common language of that "debate"?

You can fill in the gory details of the problem: on the one hand, anything goes; on the other hand anything is acceptable and must be accepted (in the name of tolerence). Opinions are personal, categories are arbitrary and foggy, and the only basis for commonality is a very loose and changing list of policy statements that could just as easily be their opposites. It is not just mysticism and pop-theories that are at issue. There is a century worth of slogans, assumptions, "facts" which are "well known" or "commonly known"... Even simple logic is not required.

Yes, class perspective is the key to it but the political chaos extends so far that even that is tough to put your finger on in a practical way.

Materialism, "cold" pursuit of the "truth" for practical reasons, basic class partisanship, a method for determining what is correct and accurate and what is not, agreement on these methods and the history from which these are derived - these are the most rudimentary tools of a political movement.

Otherwise, everything just spins...

like water in a toilet bowl...

just to be dumped into the sewer...

and get piped into the Idea Treatment Plant...

only to go through the same cycle once again...

It ain't "philosophy"... It's a common language and method... very rigorously adhered to... at a hundred different levels of sophistication...

but fundamentally starting with the soldiers' quote in John Reed:

"If you aren't for one class, you are for the other..."

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...politics is always a "discussion"...

Very important point. This is so simple and so obvious, so important, yet so misunderstood. Discussion is the lever that moves the earth politically. People live on a world of sales and marketing slogans and simplistic dualities. Discussion is harnessed to a specific narrow purpose - selling people in alternative A or attacking alternative B, for the purpose of getting them to vote a certain way or give money to something. No genuine discussion can ever happen.


Think about it in either the narrow terms of the "left" websites you visit or in the larger sense of politics in America, as a whole. What is the basis... the most fundamental basis ... for debate? What is the common language of that "debate"?

Excellent questions. Two changes that I see over the last 30 years or so. First, modern people think you do stuff by remote control or something. They don't connect every day life to politics except in the most obscure and oblique ways. The second change is that instead of politics being seen as an all-inclusive subject embracing everything about public life of intense interest to everyone, it has become a niche special interest hobby activity competing for people's attention with sports, entertainment and stamp collecting. Stamp collecting actually generates more interest and more discussion than politics.


Yes, class perspective is the key to it but the political chaos extends so far that even that is tough to put your finger on in a practical way.

The broader and more general the better, with specifics and details worked out as you go. Starting with specifics, you never get to the broad or general. No broad and general ideas and principles means no effective mobilizing of public opinion, and that means no effective politics.


"If you aren't for one class, you are for the other..."

Brilliant. How do we communicate that to the activists? Why do the unsophisticated people understand this, yet the intellectuals don't? What IS the political context for the intellectuals on the Left if it isn't working class versus ruling class? Smart versus stupid? Successful versus losers? Beautiful versus ugly? Enlightened versus "asleep?"

How come the "house Negroes" example doesn't resonate for people? After all, surviving as an intellectual - if we refuse to see ourselves as working class - means betraying the field Negroes and shilling for the man. If you aren't going to do real work, then you are getting paid for being a mouthpiece for the wealthy and powerful.

Why do intellectuals and professionals earning $50,000 a year feel more kinship with those making $50,000 a minute than they do with those making $5 an hour?

Why do intellectuals and professionals earning $50,000 a year feel more kinship with those making $50,000 a minute than they do with those making $5 an hour?

I don't know the answer to this, although I have many opinions, as I know you do. For me, part of the issue is in the discussion above about the history of immigration and small property in the U.S. Part of the issue is in black and white. Certainly, many African-Americans understand the field negro analogy, as do others. Part of it is also in the impact of Imperialism, and with it, both the wealth and the mutation of social circumstances and "thinking" in the "home" countries. Still, the issue is moot in large part because circumstances have changed and are changing further.

If I take the "one class or the other" choice seriously, one of the first questions that faces me is, "where do our ideas come from?". Though the answer is infinitely complex, at bottom it is still grounded in, "which class?". The one place where they do not come from is from "deep within us".

If I look around, I see a complete mess... middle-class thinking everywhere, though even the existence of that "class" is largely historical (and illusory) and though even its definition has changed many times. I have heard you say, "there is no left" to which I always respond, there are "many lefts". In truth we are emphasizing two aspects of the same thing, like the blind men and the elephant, and it applies equally well to "radicalism", "politics", and even to "socialism".

I am a Marxist, and not even an "exotic" one at that... a run-of-the-mill, very conventional commie. But, I've lost all patience with the silly slogans of my craft, despite knowing the very real history and understandable origins of them. If that is true, it goes without saying that I have even less tolerence for those looking for "alternatives", or "taking a critical view of social sytems", or "searching for the most humane forms of social organization"... yadayada, let alone those searching for an "ethical presence". Yeah right. As if it were up to "you".

So, I'm goin' back to "basics", even before basics in some ways, and asking every question I can think of again, in the most ordered way I can manage - starting with the most important one, "who is doing the talkin'".

I kind of get that this is daunting... sorta like starting out in Florida and deciding to walk to Nome. But, hell, Alabama doesn't seem so far away. You're one of the good guys... as you get a chance, walk with me a little.

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For me, part of the issue is in the discussion above about the history of immigration and small property in the U.S.

Absolutely. This is why I keep harping on the farming point of view. Two things happened here that were very remarkable and that have enormous political impact. Unlike in the old country - any country - people here could own a plot of land, and they could hunt. For hundreds of years the first was impossible, and the second was a hanging offense. Those two things represent the tangible fruits of the American experiment, itself the product of hundreds of years of struggle by the peasants against the aristocracy. It is no accident that modern city liberals attack those things - farming and gun ownership. People in rural areas see that as peasants (themselves) against aristocracy (city slicker liberals).

For millions of Americans, any political program that threatens either of those two hard won rights is a step backwards - a very large and important step backwards, and a loss of real rights as opposed to theoretical rights.

Here I am surrounded by the descendants of peasants - Frisian, Westphalian, Finnish, Moravian, Wendish, East Anglian, In other parts of the state the farmers may be Bavarian, Czech, Scots-Irish, African American, and we have a new group getting a toehold, indigenous people from Central America. For all of them, the dream is the same - independence and self-reliance. At the same time, farming communities are very strong and cooperative, and agriculture is heavily regulated, perhaps even more so than medicine. That blend of cooperative communities, regulated commerce, government management of the public resources and public health and independent small landholders is very powerful.

If I take the "one class or the other" choice seriously, one of the first questions that faces me is, "where do our ideas come from?". Though the answer is infinitely complex, at bottom it is still grounded in, "which class?". The one place where they do not come from is from "deep within us".


I am a Marxist, and not even an "exotic" one at that... a run-of-the-mill, very conventional commie. But, I've lost all patience with the silly slogans of my craft, despite knowing the very real history and understandable origins of them. If that is true, it goes without saying that I have even less tolerence for those looking for "alternatives", or "taking a critical view of social sytems", or "searching for the most humane forms of social organization"... yadayada, let alone those searching for an "ethical presence". Yeah right. As if it were up to "you".

So, I'm goin' back to "basics", even before basics in some ways, and asking every question I can think of again, in the most ordered way I can manage - starting with the most important one, "who is doing the talkin'".

That describes me, as well.

At last, the truth is revealed. How could I be such a fool?

"For starters,Marx mistakenly saw the middle class/small business owner/ entrepeneur,as part of the evil bourgeoisie.Nor did Marx recognize the importance of a black market,in a repressive society.Marx also uses the old problem/reaction/solution dialectic,that has been co-opted by those in government,and was brought into full fruition with 9/11.This is a point Alex Jones has begun to make in recent weeks,as he has begun to drift more and more into,what those who recognize it,as anarcho-capitalism.(I don't know how much of this stuff he has read,but,like myself,Alex is a smart,self-educated guy,who spends waaay too much time on the web.)Just the other day,Alex was saying how we must not allow people to slip into Marxism,as he has military documents,which he says they are going to be rewintroducing Marxism,into America to create phony dissent groups,that they can later come in and quash. I believe it.That said,the left needs new beliefs to rally around,as for what,I suggest agorism,and market anarchism;I defer to the experts,Wally Conger,and Samuel E. Konkin III (SEK3),who can explain the failure of Marxism,better than I:"

http://www.progressiveindependent.com/d ... id=65287#1 (http://www.progressiveindependent.com/dc/dcboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=104&topic_id=65287#1)

Plenty more where that came from. A fine confection for those who would have their cake and eat it too.

Distraction and misdirection, everywhere.

Edit: cause my wretched machine crashed again.

At last, the truth is revealed. How could I be such a fool?

"For starters,Marx mistakenly saw the middle class/small business owner/ entrepeneur,as part of the evil bourgeoisie.Nor did Marx recognize the importance of a black market,in a repressive society.Marx also uses the old problem/reaction/solution dialectic,that has been co-opted by those in government,and was brought into full fruition with 9/11.This is a point Alex Jones has begun to make in recent weeks,as he has begun to drift more and more into,what those who recognize it,as anarcho-capitalism.(I don't know how much of this stuff he has read,but,like myself,Alex is a smart,self-educated guy,who spends waaay too much time on the web.)Just the other day,Alex was saying how we must not allow people to slip into Marxism,as he has military documents,which he says they are going to be rewintroducing Marxism,into America to create phony dissent groups,that they can later come in and quash. I believe it.That said,the left needs new beliefs to rally around,as for what,I suggest agorism,and market anarchism;I defer to the experts,Wally Conger,and Samuel E. Konkin III (SEK3),who can explain the failure of Marxism,better than I:"

http://www.progressiveindependent.com/d ... id=65287#1 (http://www.progressiveindependent.com/dc/dcboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=104&topic_id=65287#1)

Yup, very true. We're creating "phony dissent groups" that can later be "quashed" (though, it might be more efficient to NOT create them in the first place).

In the meantime, did you notice that the poster is quoting our very own "Asshole behind door #2"?

http://populistindependent.org/phpbb/vi ... .php?t=215 (http://populistindependent.org/phpbb/viewtopic.php?t=215)

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"who is doing the talkin' "

This past Saturday I went to visit a dood I recently met who sells African art, clothes, and revolutionary literature. He is an organizer for the All Africa People's Revolutionary Party.

We sat and talked for some time. He told me that he was attacked at one point by Kwame Ture, nearly destroying his marriage and alienating him from the party for ten years. "Since he could not attack me on ideological grounds, he did so on personal ones." His eyes welling, he said "It really hurt. It still hurts."

He said the problem was that Kwame Ture was a petty, and he was not. That that was the problem with all of the liberation movements that have failed in Africa and around the world.

Seems to this neophyte that you are quite right about the first question to ask, sir Anax...

Is it just me, or did you kinda stop short in this discussion of Pisarev and his contribution of materialism? I have so far conceived of this guy not solely as separate from Marx in geography but also in time. Having noted the date of the Communist Manifesto as 1848 in my reading over the weekend, I see that this was a misunderstanding on my part and that the development of the idea was rather coincidental, kinda like the pyramids on either side of the Atlantic.

That alone is an interesting comment on, and substantial bolstering of, the idea of a human development that proceeds in a certain and largely fixed way, at least on the very most macro scale.

Perhaps then it is necessary to comment on what is substantial about Pisarev that causes you to toot his horn louder than that of Chernyshevsky whom you said Marx learned Russian expressly to read...

"who is doing the talkin' "

This past Saturday I went to visit a dood I recently met who sells African art, clothes, and revolutionary literature. He is an organizer for the All Africa People's Revolutionary Party.

We sat and talked for some time. He told me that he was attacked at one point by Kwame Ture, nearly destroying his marriage and alienating him from the party for ten years. "Since he could not attack me on ideological grounds, he did so on personal ones." His eyes welling, he said "It really hurt. It still hurts."

He said the problem was that Kwame Ture was a petty, and he was not. That that was the problem with all of the liberation movements that have failed in Africa and around the world.

Seems to this neophyte that you are quite right about the first question to ask, sir Anax...

Is it just me, or did you kinda stop short in this discussion of Pisarev and his contribution of materialism? I have so far conceived of this guy not solely as separate from Marx in geography but also in time. Having noted the date of the Communist Manifesto as 1848 in my reading over the weekend, I see that this was a misunderstanding on my part and that the development of the idea was rather coincidental, kinda like the pyramids on either side of the Atlantic.

That alone is an interesting comment on, and substantial bolstering of, the idea of a human development that proceeds in a certain and largely fixed way, at least on the very most macro scale.

Perhaps then it is necessary to comment on what is substantial about Pisarev that causes you to toot his horn louder than that of Chernyshevsky whom you said Marx learned Russian expressly to read...

The timing is a little different too... Marx was a young guy in 1848, just starting out on his career of becoming the second most famous person in history. His writings were not widely known. Add geography, censorship, the fact that neither Pisarev nor Chernyshevsky was an emigre, etc. and you get the disconnect. Pisarev post-dates the Manifesto but predates it ideologically. There are continental writers on the same track as Pisarev, 50 years before. In fact, that is part of the point - "Where do ideas come from?'

Why Pisarev and not Chernyshevsky? No reason. They are virtually the same to me, as is Nikolay Dobrolyubov:

http://www.hrionline.ac.uk/rva/texts/do ... robib.html (http://www.hrionline.ac.uk/rva/texts/dobroliubov/dobrobib.html)

http://publ.lib.ru/ARCHIVES/D/DOBROLYUBOV_Nikolay_Aleksandrovich/.Online/Dobrolyubov_N._A.-2..jpg

Death's Jest

What if I die? 'Twere little grief!
But one fear wrings my breast—
Perhaps Death too, may play on me
A grim, insulting jest.

I fear that over my cold corpse
Hot tears may fall in showers;
That someone, with a foolish zeal,
May heap my bier with flowers;

That friends may crowd behind my hearse
With thoughts of grief sincere,
And when I lie beneath the mould,
Men's hearts may hold me dear;

That all which I so eagerly
And vainly used to crave
In life, may brightly smile on me
When I am in my grave!

Nikolay Aleksandrovich Dobrolyubov (1836 - 1861)



Pisarev is a good writer and I very much liked "Bees". I wrote about Chernyshevsky earlier on this board.

You are right that I stopped short on Pisarev. Why is he important? Well, he is the independent genisis of an idea, applied through the most ruthless criticism of the reactionary fog that surrounded him, and I obviously think there are analogous lessons which apply to our times. But, he is also at the beginning of a history worth telling. Unfortunately, it requires a mini opus and I am having trouble getting to it. I'll get there...

.

Not that I want to disparage Pisarev et al., but I just thought I ought to mention a little bit of poetry by a radical priest, ca. 1380CE:

Qhanne Adam dalf et Eva spanne
Qhuo wast þanne þe gentil manne?

Says it all, really.

For me, part of the issue is in the discussion above about the history of immigration and small property in the U.S.

Absolutely. This is why I keep harping on the farming point of view...
For millions of Americans, any political program that threatens either of those two hard won rights is a step backwards - a very large and important step backwards, and a loss of real rights as opposed to theoretical rights.

Here I am surrounded by the descendants of peasants - Frisian, Westphalian, Finnish, Moravian, Wendish, East Anglian, In other parts of the state the farmers may be Bavarian, Czech, Scots-Irish, African American, and we have a new group getting a toehold, indigenous people from Central America. For all of them, the dream is the same - independence and self-reliance. At the same time, farming communities are very strong and cooperative, and agriculture is heavily regulated, perhaps even more so than medicine. That blend of cooperative communities, regulated commerce, government management of the public resources and public health and independent small landholders is very powerful.


In an August 3, 1994 speech to the National Assembly of People's Power, Raul Castro said: "Today, as our commander and chief has just pointed out, the central strategic, economic, political, ideological, for all Cuban Revolutionaries, without exception, is to guarantee the nation's food supply, and to produce sugar as Fidel has consistently pointed out in recent times.

"Yesterday we were saying that beans are as important as guns. Today we are confirming that beans are more valuable than guns, using beans generically to cover all indispensable basic foods. (However, so as not to confuse the United States, we do have guns and other weapons in plentiful supply for the defense of our country)."

- From "Making History, interviews with four generals of Cuba's Revolutionary Armed Forces" Pathfinder Books, 1997


http://www.pathfinderpress.com/s.nl/it. ... tegory=183 (http://www.pathfinderpress.com/s.nl/it.A/id.719/.f?category=183)

Not that I want to disparage Pisarev et al., but I just thought I ought to mention a little bit of poetry by a radical priest, ca. 1380CE:

Qhanne Adam dalf et Eva spanne
Qhuo wast þanne þe gentil manne?

Says it all, really.

When will you remember to translate for us linguistic pedestrians :?:

Not that I want to disparage Pisarev et al., but I just thought I ought to mention a little bit of poetry by a radical priest, ca. 1380CE:

Qhanne Adam dalf et Eva spanne
Qhuo wast þanne þe gentil manne?

Says it all, really.

When will you remember to translate for us linguistic pedestrians :?:

Translate?? It's ENGLISH!

"When Adam delved (dug) and Eve span (spun) / who was then the gentle man? (i.e., where were the nobles?)

Well, I finished the Plato piece, having gone back an reread some of it a second time. I am glad I did. It is a good one to open the work with (even as this is a presumption made before having read the great bulk of the rest). In his dissection of Plato's Idealism, Pisarev certainly fertilizes the ground he will, I expect, sow with his materialism.

I have now gotten into the second essay, Nineteenth Century Scholasticism. Before reading it all the way through, I thumbed back to the book's notes. There wasn't much of a push for me to do so in reading the bit on Plato, but many times in the second article I found myself wishing the notes were at the bottom of the page like they are in the book interviewing four Cuban revolutionary generals I am also reading.

Suffice to say, the reason they aren't became readily apparent when I got to the back of the book. They are small essays themselves! How wonderfully illuminating to see the historical context of Pisarev's work in those notes at the back of the book!

This one is a keeper, though I am now even more curious about Chernyshevsky, piqued by the mention of "The Anthropological Principle in Philosophy" and "polemical Gems."

Though revolution was definitely afoot, I am challenged by some other claims I came across today that said Russia was not ready for socialist revolution and that the Bolshevik revolution was indeed not a socialist one. Can one of our resident geniuses respond to that?

I joined this other group expressly to ask them to say more about that:
http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/WSM_Forum/

on edit, there is already a response or two. I would be interested to see if there are any contrarians among us vis those respondents' comments.

Here is a taste of them:

>
> * claims that Leninism is a distortion of Marxian analysis.
>
> How so?

Marx wrote of the working class becoming a class for itself, of the
workers movement being capable through action and discussion of
educating itself in socialism, of the workers movement being the
immense majority acting in the interests of the immense majority.

Lenin (following Kautsky) argued that the workers left to themselves
could only achieve trade-union consciousness and therefore had to be
led by a vanguard party of professional revolutionaries, organised
in an iron disciplined and centralised party.


>
> * noted, in 1918, that the Bolshevik Revolution was not
socialist.
> Had earlier, long noted that Russia was not ready for a socialist
> revolution.
>
> If not socialist, what was it then?
>

Soviet Russia established State Capitalism where the Bolshevik
leaders developed into a collective, ruling, Capitalist class. Lenin
in fact called for the development of state capitalism in Russia on
various occasions as step-forward; at other junctures he equated
socialism with state capitalism (famously when he said everybody
would be turned into employees of the state, in "The State and
Revolution").

> * was the first to recognize that the former USSR, China, Cuba
and
> other so-called "socialist countries" were not socialist, but
instead,
> state capitalist.
>
> I have a hard time swallowing this claim vis Cuba. Given the
campaign
> against Cuba since the revolution and the utter necessity of trade
> with other countries (all capitalist, of course), it is not hard to
> grasp that some elements of the socialist revolution remain as yet
> incompletely realized.

One of the basic features of capitalism is that it is a society
where the majority of wealth takes on the form of commodities
produced through wage labour. That social relationship never
vanished in Cuba. (Incidentally, socialism cannot be established in
one country.)
http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/WSM_ ... sage/32920 (http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/WSM_Forum/message/32920)
_______________________

Other than that Cuba has been subjected to American aggression and have sought
localised solutions what is there in the Cuban regime that deserves our support
. Workers are exploited , their freedom to organise either in independent unions
or political parties is denied to them . Government and Party officials lead
privileged lives as parasites upon the labour of the working class .

I am pretty sure this reply does not completely provide a full answer to you and
probably results in even more questions .
The website has links to many articles over many years offering the Socialist
Party's analysis . When we have cautioned against acceptance of political
shortcuts and fast track solutions we have sadly been proved only too right.
The proof of the pudding is in the eating . Did Leninism bring socialism any
closer ? Did the Russian Revolution improve the conditions of the Russian
workers ? We judged that the prequisites and pre-conditions did not exist .
Failure to achieve socialism was inevitable , regardless of whether Lenin and
the Bolsheviks had good intentions or not . The consequence has been that the
struggle has become even harder and more difficult because not only do we have
to expose the failings of capitalism and the weakness of apologists of
capitalism , socialists are now required to counter the confused ideas of the
Left and the cul-de-sacs and dead-ends that they present as the way forward .
http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/WSM_ ... sage/32920 (http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/WSM_Forum/message/32920)

Well, I finished the Plato piece, having gone back an reread some of it a second time. I am glad I did. It is a good one to open the work with (even as this is a presumption made before having read the great bulk of the rest). In his dissection of Plato's Idealism, Pisarev certainly fertilizes the ground he will, I expect, sow with his materialism.

I have now gotten into the second essay, Nineteenth Century Scholasticism. Before reading it all the way through, I thumbed back to the book's notes. There wasn't much of a push for me to do so in reading the bit on Plato, but many times in the second article I found myself wishing the notes were at the bottom of the page like they are in the book interviewing four Cuban revolutionary generals I am also reading.

Suffice to say, the reason they aren't became readily apparent when I got to the back of the book. They are small essays themselves! How wonderfully illuminating to see the historical context of Pisarev's work in those notes at the back of the book!

This one is a keeper, though I am now even more curious about Chernyshevsky, piqued by the mention of "The Anthropological Principle in Philosophy" and "polemical Gems."

Though revolution was definitely afoot, I am challenged by some other claims I came across today that said Russia was not ready for socialist revolution and that the Bolshevik revolution was indeed not a socialist one. Can one of our resident geniuses respond to that?

I joined this other group expressly to ask them to say more about that:
http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/WSM_Forum/

on edit, there is already a response or two. I would be interested to see if there are any contrarians among us vis those respondents' comments.

Here is a taste of them:

>
> * claims that Leninism is a distortion of Marxian analysis.
>
> How so?

Marx wrote of the working class becoming a class for itself, of the
workers movement being capable through action and discussion of
educating itself in socialism, of the workers movement being the
immense majority acting in the interests of the immense majority.

Lenin (following Kautsky) argued that the workers left to themselves
could only achieve trade-union consciousness and therefore had to be
led by a vanguard party of professional revolutionaries, organised
in an iron disciplined and centralised party.


>
> * noted, in 1918, that the Bolshevik Revolution was not
socialist.
> Had earlier, long noted that Russia was not ready for a socialist
> revolution.
>
> If not socialist, what was it then?
>

Soviet Russia established State Capitalism where the Bolshevik
leaders developed into a collective, ruling, Capitalist class. Lenin
in fact called for the development of state capitalism in Russia on
various occasions as step-forward; at other junctures he equated
socialism with state capitalism (famously when he said everybody
would be turned into employees of the state, in "The State and
Revolution").

> * was the first to recognize that the former USSR, China, Cuba
and
> other so-called "socialist countries" were not socialist, but
instead,
> state capitalist.
>
> I have a hard time swallowing this claim vis Cuba. Given the
campaign
> against Cuba since the revolution and the utter necessity of trade
> with other countries (all capitalist, of course), it is not hard to
> grasp that some elements of the socialist revolution remain as yet
> incompletely realized.

One of the basic features of capitalism is that it is a society
where the majority of wealth takes on the form of commodities
produced through wage labour. That social relationship never
vanished in Cuba. (Incidentally, socialism cannot be established in
one country.)
http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/WSM_ ... sage/32920 (http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/WSM_Forum/message/32920)
_______________________

Other than that Cuba has been subjected to American aggression and have sought
localised solutions what is there in the Cuban regime that deserves our support
. Workers are exploited , their freedom to organise either in independent unions
or political parties is denied to them . Government and Party officials lead
privileged lives as parasites upon the labour of the working class .

I am pretty sure this reply does not completely provide a full answer to you and
probably results in even more questions .
The website has links to many articles over many years offering the Socialist
Party's analysis . When we have cautioned against acceptance of political
shortcuts and fast track solutions we have sadly been proved only too right.
The proof of the pudding is in the eating . Did Leninism bring socialism any
closer ? Did the Russian Revolution improve the conditions of the Russian
workers ? We judged that the prequisites and pre-conditions did not exist .
Failure to achieve socialism was inevitable , regardless of whether Lenin and
the Bolsheviks had good intentions or not . The consequence has been that the
struggle has become even harder and more difficult because not only do we have
to expose the failings of capitalism and the weakness of apologists of
capitalism , socialists are now required to counter the confused ideas of the
Left and the cul-de-sacs and dead-ends that they present as the way forward .
http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/WSM_ ... sage/32920 (http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/WSM_Forum/message/32920)

I promised to tell the story of Pisarev etal, and I just haven't been able to do it (no time), despite the fact that I know it very well. The actual history tells the story a hundred times better than the "commentaries". It also runs into another promise I made to tell the mensh/bolsh story... The split is precisely about the "Is Russia ready for socialism", question and has nothing whatever to do with "democratic versus authoritarian" and all the rest of the bullshit jive people layer onto it (much like writing "the silly lives of Catholic saints over the great works of ancient heathendom..."). I'll look on the web and see what is available for a history and try to annotate that instead of writing my own. I have to answer Wolf's and KOBH's very good questions on fetishism first, as well as answer megan (if she is not AWOL).

The examples from the yahoo group above are a real swamp... "Socialism", my ass... Yes about "state capitalism", etc. but said in the most convoluted, upside down, way as to be pure nonsense. A very important piece of advice I handed down to chlamor, that was once given to me: read the originals and the history. The commentaries are not worth a damn (not a farthing). You will find enough "claims" to swamp an aircraft carrier. Develop your own method and go back far enough to get clean of these characters and their sewer.

That is why Pisarev, and many, many others, matter. It is like watching the birth of an idea, just as with the birth of a new calf or foal. The tragedy that comes with it is nothing but the pains of labor...

.

I promised to tell the story of Pisarev etal, and I just haven't been able to do it (no time), despite the fact that I know it very well. The actual history tells the story a hundred times better than the "commentaries". It also runs into another promise I made to tell the mensh/bolsh story... The split is precisely about the "Is Russia ready for socialism", question and has nothing whatever to do with "democratic versus authoritarian" and all the rest of the bullshit jive people layer onto it (much like writing "the silly lives of Catholic saints over the great works of ancient heathendom..."). I'll look on the web and see what is available for a history and try to annotate that instead of writing my own. I have to answer Wolf's and KOBH's very good questions on fetishism first, as well as answer megan (if she is not AWOL).

The examples from the yahoo group above are a real swamp... "Socialism", my ass... Yes about "state capitalism", etc. but said in the most convoluted, upside down, way as to be pure nonsense. A very important piece of advice I handed down to chlamor, that was once given to me: read the originals and the history. The commentaries are not worth a damn (not a farthing). You will find enough "claims" to swamp an aircraft carrier. Develop your own method and go back far enough to get clean of these characters and their sewer.

That is why Pisarev, and many, many others, matter. It is like watching the birth of an idea, just as with the birth of a new calf or foal. The tragedy that comes with it is nothing but the pains of labor...

.

Let me just offer up a very simple Thanks.

It is with the utmost gratitude and humility that I can say how wonderful it has been to cross your cyber-path. I do not need to hope that it will be transformative, for it already is.

In the words of Chlamor, albeit not in the viciously accurate way he wields them, Shine On. Yes, do Shine On.

A Russian Word for a Latin American Disease
Ibsen Martinez
January 8, 2007

http://www.econlib.org/Library/Columns/ ... ulism.html (http://www.econlib.org/Library/Columns/y2007/Martinezpopulism.html)

Ibsen Martinez is of that type of the “right-wing-left-wing” journalist who has been almost unique to Latin America since the beginnings of the Latin press. Full of the most philistine pomposity, adopting pseudo-intellectual airs of superiority that amount to no more than run-of-the-mill cynicism, and writing with a pox-on-all-their-houses sneer that belies the fact that he is mainly reprinted by the worst of the ruling class press, Martinez brings to politics what Fernando Lamas brought to relations between the sexes: a singularly ignorant pigheadedness that transcends debate. For this alone, if not for his continuous sniping at his countryman, Hugo Chavez, it is no wonder that publications such as the Washington Post are eager to reprint his “commentaries”. Once protected mostly by the monopoly they held under fascist press laws, it is now this yanqui crossover appeal that gives Martinez and his predecessors teeth, and contrasts them so sharply with the raw power of the genuine Left Press in Latin America.

http://www.econlib.org/Library/Columns/y2005/Martinez.jpg

Why then do we care about what Martinez has to say about N.G. Chernishevsky, or anyone else for that matter? Two reasons…

First, Martinez, writes about Chernishevsky, not a century ago but earlier this year, and not on account of having stumbled across him in some obscure library of ancient forgotten Russian literary figures, but in the all too contemporary context of Latin American, and specifically Venezuelan politics, today. In fact, Martinez’s criticism is miserably undistinguished. His “criticism” is anecdotal. He mentions, foremost, the opinions of the exceedingly weird and reactionary, émigré White Russian writer, Vladimir Nabakov. In truth it is not even Nabakov himself but Nabakov biographer, Brian Boyd, talking about a 1938 Nabakov literary character, “Fyodor Godunov-Cherdyntsev” who just happens to be a fictional biographer of Chernishevsky. And what is this “criticism”, four times removed? It is that Chernishevsky puttered around with perpetual motion machines and was imprisoned for most of his life.

Why bother then, to even bring up this forgotten name? Because, second, while Martinez may not know what to say about Chernishevsky, he does know why he matters. He quotes Franco Venturi, "Herzen created populism; Chernishevsky was its politician". In “populism”, Martinez recognizes, not just the indistinct yearnings for justice of every people, often finding its expression in confused “movements” such as the supremely anti-intellectual and blithely eclectic and opportunist musings of William Jennings Bryan, but instead, a very specific movement, born in the criticism of the ideas at hand, binding tightly to the “people”, though what that means may still remain indistinct, and itself a way-station on the road to a revolutionary consciousness which supercedes its origins. In fact, Martinez precisely recognizes why I started writing about Chernishevsky and then Pisarev, at the fortuitously named “Populist Independent”:


Populism" once was a plain Russian word for a movable, complex Russian family of themes.

"Russian Populism is the name not of a single political party, nor of a coherent body of doctrine" notes Sir Isaiah Berlin, "but of a widespread radical movement in Russia in the middle of the nineteenth century. It was born during the great social and intellectual ferment that followed the death of Tsar Nicholas I and the defeat and humiliation of the Crimean War, grew to fame and influence during the sixties and seventies, and reached its culmination with the assassination of Tsar Alexander II, after which it swiftly declined."

The word "populism" had its share of good luck and it fared well as a hint of something certainly difficult to define but quite easy to sympathize with. Russian Populists not only yearned to destroy absolutism, abolish slavery and defeat their country's economic and cultural backwardness: they also wanted to replace the tsarist state—the embodiment of authoritarianism, injustice and inequality—with a new and liberating something called "revolution".

"All these thinkers share one vast apocalyptic assumption: that once the reign of evil—autocracy, exploitation, inequality—is consumed in the fire of the revolution, there will arise naturally and spontaneously out of its ashes a natural, harmonious, just order, needing only the gentle guidance of the enlightened revolutionaries to attain to its proper perfection. This great Utopian dream, based on simple faith in regenerated human nature, was a vision which the Populists shared with Godwin and Bakunin, Marx and Lenin. Its heart is the pattern of sin and fall and resurrection, of the road to the earthly paradise the gates of which will only open if men find the one true way and follow it".

According to the Italian historian supreme, Franco Venturi, "[Alexander] Herzen ( 1812-1870) created populism; [Nikolai] Chernishevsky was its politician".

A self-taught man who thought that literature was the best mean to publicize his political ideals, Chernishevsky infused Russian populism with its distinguishing qualities and, even as he kept changing his views on what the Russian revolution should involve and mean, his writings inspired generations of Populist activists during the sixties and the seventies.

While imprisoned in Petrograd's Peter and Paul Fortress—from 1862 to 1864—he wrote "What is to be done?", a novel deemed by many of his contemporaries as a handbook of Russian radicalism. So influential was this book that it led to the creation of a strong and widespread—if ultimately failed—, populist Land and Liberty political society. V.I. Lenin named one of his pamphlets after Chernishevsky's novel and it was the hero of Chernishevsky's novel who coined the phrase 'the worse the better': the worse the social conditions became for the poor, the more willing they would be to support a revolution.

However committed to the cause of the downtrodden, the lifelong fickleness of Chernishevsky's cogitations makes it very difficult to ascertain the core of his politics. The naiveness with which he used to address social and political matters as well as his insistence in writing dull novels to convey the maze of his enthusiasm, disappointments, fierce denunciations and political programs can make the reading of his work an exacting experience.

V.I. Lenin, however, considered that Chernishevsky was "the one true great writer who managed to remain on a level of unbroken philosophical materialism from the fifties right up to 1888"…

The basic approach of Russian Populists towards economics was, generally speaking, moral and even religious. Russian Populists "shrank from the prospect of industrialism in Russia because its brutal cost, and they disliked the West because it had paid this price too heartlessly".5 They believed in socialism not because it was feasible but because, to their eyes, it was just. But the most pervasive belief among Russian Populists was that the salvation could not lie in Western-styled liberal politics.
The defeat of the European revolutions in 1848-49 confirmed them in their mistrust of Western liberal democratic ideals. "As for political rights, votes, parliaments, republican forms, these were meaningless and useless to ignorant and barbarous, half-naked and starving men; such programs merely mocked their misery."…

Meeting this kind of argumentation against liberal democracy, republican forms and capitalism, as well as the advocacy of indigenous culture and "alternative roads" towards development and social justice can be an unsettling experience in 21 century Latin America. They all ring as too familiar for intellectual comfort…

To be sure, Latin American populism is not indebted to Chernishevsky's musings on "illustrated despotism" and perpetual motion machines. But it certainly shares the same disdain for individual liberties and capitalism held by those late 19th century Russian narodniki militants. Latin American populism has, of course, a history of its own, heroes of its own, intellectual superstitions and popular myths of its own.

Having said so, one question still lingers on. How a word—"populist"—that once meant heroism, disinterestedness and personal nobility in Russia has come to name corruption, lawlessness, contempt for individual liberties and poverty in our continent? I think it is a story worth telling.

In forthcoming articles I will try to delve, intently and to the best of my wits, into that history.

The ghost of the titan, N. G. Chernishevsky, walks upright in Venezuela today, and it is the midget with the titanic cigar, Ibsen Martinez’s, sole redeeming feature that he knows enough to call the apparition by name…
.

Anax, was this written for publication somewhere or just for this little 'ol site here?

Anyway, an interesting thing about perpetual motion machines: Newton's Firstly Law (partially) states an object in motion tends to stay in motion unless acted on by an outside force

Tell me about Bryan if you have a moment, I remember taking American History once and not being entirely unsympathetic to his views in general (I mean take Chlamor for instance. He might not call it "evolution" but, say, western "rationalism" or some shit like that). The Scopes Monkey Trial was kind of a boner though. Come to think of it, I'm setting myself up here, because maybe he was more of a loon than I think..

Anax, was this written for publication somewhere or just for this little 'ol site here?

Anyway, an interesting thing about perpetual motion machines: Newton's Firstly Law (partially) states an object in motion tends to stay in motion unless acted on by an outside force

Tell me about Bryan if you have a moment, I remember taking American History once and not being entirely unsympathetic to his views in general (I mean take Chlamor for instance. He might not call it "evolution" but, say, western "rationalism" or some shit like that). The Scopes Monkey Trial was kind of a boner though. Come to think of it, I'm setting myself up here, because maybe he was more of a loon than I think..

I presume that he wrote it for El Nacional which is Venuzuela's largest paper and "left-of-center", although it has been hostile to Chavez ever since he started talking about actually nationalizing various industries (left "talk" is OK). I think so because he writes a weekly column for that paper and I assume that the attack on Chernishevsky is a thinly veiled attack on Chavez. Amazing how they go straight to the source, isn't it?

Bryan is a very big loon, not that you can't find much you can agree with in something that he wrote or said. In American history, populism often straddles the politics of reaction and the politics of the people. In many ways, it is a step back from the Russian original, although there are some mighty exceptions.

I'll see if I can find something interesting, other than Cross of Gold.

.

In American history, populism often straddles the politics of reaction and the politics of the people.

.

Why is that, I wonder? The Republican party formed from a coalition of abolitionists and know-nothings, for example. My theory - anti-authoritarianism and anti-intellectualism have an affinity; populism and volkism have an affinity. When we look at politics as two dimensional on a conservative-liberal scale we miss a third dimension, and those affinities seem absurd.

Anax, was this written for publication somewhere or just for this little 'ol site here?

Anyway, an interesting thing about perpetual motion machines: Newton's Firstly Law (partially) states an object in motion tends to stay in motion unless acted on by an outside force

Tell me about Bryan if you have a moment, I remember taking American History once and not being entirely unsympathetic to his views in general (I mean take Chlamor for instance. He might not call it "evolution" but, say, western "rationalism" or some shit like that). The Scopes Monkey Trial was kind of a boner though. Come to think of it, I'm setting myself up here, because maybe he was more of a loon than I think..

I presume that he wrote it for El Nacional which is Venuzuela's largest paper and "left-of-center", although it has been hostile to Chavez ever since he started talking about actually nationalizing various industries (left "talk" is OK). I think so because he writes a weekly column for that paper and I assume that the attack on Chernishevsky is a thinly veiled attack on Chavez. Amazing how they go straight to the source, isn't it?
.

I meant your post about it not his article :)

In American history, populism often straddles the politics of reaction and the politics of the people.

.

Why is that, I wonder? The Republican party formed from a coalition of abolitionists and know-nothings, for example. My theory - anti-authoritarianism and anti-intellectualism have an affinity; populism and volkism have an affinity. When we look at politics as two dimensional on a conservative-liberal scale we miss a third dimension, and those affinities seem absurd.

Mike are you drawing a comparison to Nazi Germany or does volkeism have more than one connotation?

[quote="Kid Of The Black Hole":3rr2v0jd]Anax, was this written for publication somewhere or just for this little 'ol site here?

Anyway, an interesting thing about perpetual motion machines: Newton's Firstly Law (partially) states an object in motion tends to stay in motion unless acted on by an outside force

Tell me about Bryan if you have a moment, I remember taking American History once and not being entirely unsympathetic to his views in general (I mean take Chlamor for instance. He might not call it "evolution" but, say, western "rationalism" or some shit like that). The Scopes Monkey Trial was kind of a boner though. Come to think of it, I'm setting myself up here, because maybe he was more of a loon than I think..

I presume that he wrote it for El Nacional which is Venuzuela's largest paper and "left-of-center", although it has been hostile to Chavez ever since he started talking about actually nationalizing various industries (left "talk" is OK). I think so because he writes a weekly column for that paper and I assume that the attack on Chernishevsky is a thinly veiled attack on Chavez. Amazing how they go straight to the source, isn't it?
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I meant your post about it not his article :)[/quote:3rr2v0jd]

Most of what I write here, ends up, in whole or in part, "elsewhere". Did you pick that up from the above? In order to write a polemic against someone, your readers have to know who they are. Martinez writes for El Nuevo Herald in Miami. The above is part of a longer polemic.

This won't be a "little 'ol site", forever... unless the "handful" becomes bored.

.

[quote="Kid Of The Black Hole":3u6qs3nj]Anax, was this written for publication somewhere or just for this little 'ol site here?

Anyway, an interesting thing about perpetual motion machines: Newton's Firstly Law (partially) states an object in motion tends to stay in motion unless acted on by an outside force

Tell me about Bryan if you have a moment, I remember taking American History once and not being entirely unsympathetic to his views in general (I mean take Chlamor for instance. He might not call it "evolution" but, say, western "rationalism" or some shit like that). The Scopes Monkey Trial was kind of a boner though. Come to think of it, I'm setting myself up here, because maybe he was more of a loon than I think..

I presume that he wrote it for El Nacional which is Venuzuela's largest paper and "left-of-center", although it has been hostile to Chavez ever since he started talking about actually nationalizing various industries (left "talk" is OK). I think so because he writes a weekly column for that paper and I assume that the attack on Chernishevsky is a thinly veiled attack on Chavez. Amazing how they go straight to the source, isn't it?
.

I meant your post about it not his article :)

Most of what I write here, ends up, in whole or in part, "elsewhere". Did you pick that up from the above? In order to write a polemic against someone, your readers have to know who they are. Martinez writes for El Nuevo Herald in Miami. The above is part of a longer polemic.

This won't be a "little 'ol site", forever... unless the "handful" becomes bored.

.[/quote:3u6qs3nj]

I was unaware until now the coming hurricane in your alley is one of your own making :)

On edit, it is precisely this kinda stuff the threading together of history and current events that I had hoped we could all work together to report and massage into content for the drupal portion of this site... These are things that should never sink to the bottom.

In American history, populism often straddles the politics of reaction and the politics of the people.

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Why is that, I wonder? The Republican party formed from a coalition of abolitionists and know-nothings, for example. My theory - anti-authoritarianism and anti-intellectualism have an affinity; populism and volkism have an affinity. When we look at politics as two dimensional on a conservative-liberal scale we miss a third dimension, and those affinities seem absurd.

I think that the narrative of Russian "populism" is that Russian democratic ideals, held full-square by the Russian liberals, run head first into the wall of the autocracy. Because that liberalism has such a weak base, the result is a suicidal endeavor that not only crushes the Liberals, but reduces them to absolute bankruptcy, whereupon they depart the historical stage, arguably to this very day. In their place arises the harshest criticism of the social circumstances (the so-called "Nihilists"), who, though they initially target the liberals and hide as "literary criticism", nevertheless, they are themselves quickly swept up by the same autocracy. In response, there is no choice but to "go to the people", as Herzen invites them to do. But, that act itself is transformative. Neither those who "go", or the ideas they "go" with, nor those who are "gone to", are homogeneous. Ideas, tactics, program, loyalties, ideology and the "people" themselves, are all changed by the struggle. The most left wing "peoples'" party at the beginning of movement, ends up being the most right-wing party by the time of the revolution. All of this happens in a more or less linear way ("inevitable", in retrospect) and it is for that reason alone that this history is worth revisiting.

American populism is more complicated, with little that is "linear". Certainly the "populism" of Debs or of "Fightin' Bob" has much in common with the above, even as that of Bryan or Coughlin, at the extreme, has almost nothing to do with it. Part of the problem is "race" (the landmine in front of every American movement), part of the issue is that American populism historically faced even a more heterogeneous class makeup, within which, not "all of the people" were "goin' down"... in fact, some of them were "goin' up". Some of the problem is in this "middle-class", whether it is an actual class or not, and we have touched on it before. Once again, this is a very important question, well worth talking about.

I have never had much fear of volkism. I don't think fascism has ever had much of an independent popular base but, instead, always derives its power from its relationship to the ruling class. I see no evidence that the reactionary yearning to "return" to some mythical past has ever really taken over truely broad movements in American history, although the ability of those screwy ideas to derail such movements are undeniable.

The "anti-intellectualism", is a more serious problem. Part of the importance of the "Nihilists", and what makes them similar to the Jacobins who come before and the socialists who come after, is that "populism' is also a movement of (evolving) ideas. There is nothing in what already exists that can be taken whole (as was argued for the Russian mir) as the basis for the new society. This realization is the oldest one of all, confounding even the Diggers that both of us admire.

.

Mike are you drawing a comparison to Nazi Germany or does volkeism have more than one connotation?

No, not drawing a comparison to Nazi Germany..

Volk - the German idea of national character; the tribe; "us." It is better than the English word "folk" for describing the "plain people."

In the US, the "volk" are the people that I have been calling "Jacksonian." They are rebelling from the right wing now over the immigration issue - very typically Jacksonian and reminiscent of the know nothings. "I don't know much, but..." Unlike in Germany, where to this day "blood" determines citizenship, and where those with foreign blood cannot be citizens, the American volk expands and incorporates other ethnic groups, which is why it isn't quite accurate to call it racist. The volk fear and mistrust other groups, not different individuals. You see this operating in rural areas, where eccentric people, GLBT people, and minorities are accepted into the group wholeheartedly. In more sophisticated areas, people are officially tolerated, as it were, but are always outsiders. Once you are in with the volk, you are in and people are fiercely loyal to you. What are perceived as groups, however, are resisted. This is why much liberal activism backfires with the Jacksonians - it promotes groups. Jacksonians see the sophisticated liberal tolerance as hypocritical, since it is theoretical and not practical, and since it blames them, working poor people, for social problems over which they have little or no control.

Loyalty to the tribe, duty, common sense, pragmatism, straight talk, being down to earth, going for the tried and true, are the "values" that the Republicans pander to, and that liberals misread and mock and ridicule.

The blue collar people who are voting Republican are voting against something, not so much voting against any socialism or even liberalism, they are voting against the liberals themselves. They can see - accurately I think - that John Kerry, for example, is no friend to the working people.

I have never had much fear of volkism. I don't think fascism has ever had much of an independent popular base but, instead, always derives its power from its relationship to the ruling class.

Very astute and accurate.


I see no evidence that the reactionary yearning to "return" to some mythical past has ever really taken over truely broad movements in American history, although the ability of those screwy ideas to derail such movements are undeniable.


For many people, it is the present they want to protect. City folk assume that it is all in some mythical past and that people want to return to it. Here there are many people still living the way their ancestors did, and they see themselves as desperately hanging on against all odds. You need to see that to understand the appeal of "you'll have to pry it out of my cold dead hands" and "traditional values." It aslo explains the intense patriotism - it isn't the current government that is being defended in the minds of the average enlistee here, it is "us" - the plain people. Smarter people somewhere figure out the where and when ( a good thing really - the concept of a military that is under civilian control) - service, duty and honor are constants. They are well aware that it is always a "rich man's war and a poor man's fight."

When liberals say "the country" they mean the ruling class, and the government. When Republican-voting Jacksonians say "the country" they mean family, friends, and neighbors. Anyone can join that country, regardless of race or other things that are barriers in the city, once they demonstrate commitment the ideals of freedom, self-reliance, dedication to community, sacrifice and willingness to pitch in. No one is considered to be part of the country who does not pass that test, and that is why liberals can be seen as un-American - liberals mock the people and the values. They "talk a good game" - all people are equal - but what they really do is promote groups of people as though they were pets, or something. In fact, pets get as much or more "compassion" as brown people and GLBT people, and "rights" are demanded for animals with the same, or more, passion as people. Round up and detain brown people, and there is little interest from the liberals. Do the same thing to cats or horses, and the hue and cry reaches fever pitch. This because liberals "care" for their helpless inferiors - and that is how they see AA people and indigenous people - cute pets that we "care" about.

In this way, liberals are more racist, and more in league with the ruling class than the NASCAR rednecks are or ever will be. They conflate "country" with ruling class without even being aware that they do, and all of their "caring" about the poor and minority people is founded on an assumption that people in those groups are inferior and therefore need their compassion.

When I describe the way things actually are today in rural areas, city liberals sneer and accuse me of "romanticizing" rural life and people. That is because it is only in books and movies that they come into contact with these ideas and characters, so they assume that is the only place that they exist. Any defense of blue collar people is seen by liberals as romanticization - as opposed to realism, which is supposed to inform us that they are all uneducated, ignorant, violent, racist, criminal numbskulls. But don't call liberals aristocratic or elitist!

I have never had much fear of volkism. I don't think fascism has ever had much of an independent popular base but, instead, always derives its power from its relationship to the ruling class.

Very astute and accurate.


I see no evidence that the reactionary yearning to "return" to some mythical past has ever really taken over truely broad movements in American history, although the ability of those screwy ideas to derail such movements are undeniable.


For many people, it is the present they want to protect. City folk assume that it is all in some mythical past and that people want to return to it. Here there are many people still living the way their ancestors did, and they see themselves as desperately hanging on against all odds. You need to see that to understand the appeal of "you'll have to pry it out of my cold dead hands" and "traditional values." It aslo explains the intense patriotism - it isn't the current government that is being defended in the minds of the average enlistee here, it is "us" - the plain people. Smarter people somewhere figure out the where and when ( a good thing really - the concept of a military that is under civilian control) - service, duty and honor are constants. They are well aware that it is always a "rich man's war and a poor man's fight."

When liberals say "the country" they mean the ruling class, and the government. When Republican-voting Jacksonians say "the country" they mean family, friends, and neighbors. Anyone can join that country, regardless of race or other things that are barriers in the city, once they demonstrate commitment the ideals of freedom, self-reliance, dedication to community, sacrifice and willingness to pitch in. No one is considered to be part of the country who does not pass that test, and that is why liberals can be seen as un-American - liberals mock the people and the values. They "talk a good game" - all people are equal - but what they really do is promote groups of people as though they were pets, or something. In fact, pets get as much or more "compassion" as brown people and GLBT people, and "rights" are demanded for animals with the same, or more, passion as people. Round up and detain brown people, and there is little interest from the liberals. Do the same thing to cats or horses, and the hue and cry reaches fever pitch. This because liberals "care" for their helpless inferiors - and that is how they see AA people and indigenous people - cute pets that we "care" about.

In this way, liberals are more racist, and more in league with the ruling class than the NASCAR rednecks are or ever will be. They conflate "country" with ruling class without even being aware that they do, and all of their "caring" about the poor and minority people is founded on an assumption that people in those groups are inferior and therefore need their compassion.

When I describe the way things actually are today in rural areas, city liberals sneer and accuse me of "romanticizing" rural life and people. That is because it is only in books and movies that they come into contact with these ideas and characters, so they assume that is the only place that they exist. Any defense of blue collar people is seen by liberals as romanticization - as opposed to realism, which is supposed to inform us that they are all uneducated, ignorant, violent, racist, criminal numbskulls. But don't call liberals aristocratic or elitist!

OMG, Mike I triple-dog dare you to register a fake-account and go post that on DU. Or, be even more direct: liberals deep down see minorities, the handicapped, and homosexuals as inferior. That is the root cause of their "activism" for these groups.

I know you've said this all before Mike, and it must be frustrating to have to keep pounding the same drum to people who aren't getting it, but I think this is one of your best forumlations of your point yet.

I remember Chlamor bringing up another point that I think bears on this too - alot of these "liberals" are the most helpless people in the world. I used to see posts about auto repair on DU that were absolutely absurd - one guy was asking about his "racking pinion". Without all the services provided by their "inferiors" they would last a week, tops. Maybe their is some sort of complex behind that - deep down they have to be aware of their own limitations especially when it comes to technical skills..

I have never had much fear of volkism. I don't think fascism has ever had much of an independent popular base but, instead, always derives its power from its relationship to the ruling class.

Very astute and accurate.


I see no evidence that the reactionary yearning to "return" to some mythical past has ever really taken over truely broad movements in American history, although the ability of those screwy ideas to derail such movements are undeniable.


For many people, it is the present they want to protect. City folk assume that it is all in some mythical past and that people want to return to it. Here there are many people still living the way their ancestors did, and they see themselves as desperately hanging on against all odds. You need to see that to understand the appeal of "you'll have to pry it out of my cold dead hands" and "traditional values." It aslo explains the intense patriotism - it isn't the current government that is being defended in the minds of the average enlistee here, it is "us" - the plain people. Smarter people somewhere figure out the where and when ( a good thing really - the concept of a military that is under civilian control) - service, duty and honor are constants. They are well aware that it is always a "rich man's war and a poor man's fight."

When liberals say "the country" they mean the ruling class, and the government. When Republican-voting Jacksonians say "the country" they mean family, friends, and neighbors. Anyone can join that country, regardless of race or other things that are barriers in the city, once they demonstrate commitment the ideals of freedom, self-reliance, dedication to community, sacrifice and willingness to pitch in. No one is considered to be part of the country who does not pass that test, and that is why liberals can be seen as un-American - liberals mock the people and the values. They "talk a good game" - all people are equal - but what they really do is promote groups of people as though they were pets, or something. In fact, pets get as much or more "compassion" as brown people and GLBT people, and "rights" are demanded for animals with the same, or more, passion as people. Round up and detain brown people, and there is little interest from the liberals. Do the same thing to cats or horses, and the hue and cry reaches fever pitch. This because liberals "care" for their helpless inferiors - and that is how they see AA people and indigenous people - cute pets that we "care" about.

In this way, liberals are more racist, and more in league with the ruling class than the NASCAR rednecks are or ever will be. They conflate "country" with ruling class without even being aware that they do, and all of their "caring" about the poor and minority people is founded on an assumption that people in those groups are inferior and therefore need their compassion.

When I describe the way things actually are today in rural areas, city liberals sneer and accuse me of "romanticizing" rural life and people. That is because it is only in books and movies that they come into contact with these ideas and characters, so they assume that is the only place that they exist. Any defense of blue collar people is seen by liberals as romanticization - as opposed to realism, which is supposed to inform us that they are all uneducated, ignorant, violent, racist, criminal numbskulls. But don't call liberals aristocratic or elitist!

OMG, Mike I triple-dog dare you to register a fake-account and go post that on DU. Or, be even more direct: liberals deep down see minorities, the handicapped, and homosexuals as inferior. That is the root cause of their "activism" for these groups.

I know you've said this all before Mike, and it must be frustrating to have to keep pounding the same drum to people who aren't getting it, but I think this is one of your best forumlations of your point yet.

I remember Chlamor bringing up another point that I think bears on this too - alot of these "liberals" are the most helpless people in the world. I used to see posts about auto repair on DU that were absolutely absurd - one guy was asking about his "racking pinion". Without all the services provided by their "inferiors" they would last a week, tops. Maybe their is some sort of complex behind that - deep down they have to be aware of their own limitations especially when it comes to technical skills..

Malcolm sez:

http://www.blackcommentator.com/230/230_images/91_x_2.gif


David Kramer and Levi Locke. Real names, real people. Two very good friends of mine, two on the opposite ends of the political spectrum. One is a radical lefty professor (with investments) while the other hasn't any teeth left speaks like a "dumb hillbilly" is openly racist (his daughter married "one of them") and delivers newspapers and cuts wood for a living. One just sold his old house for $250,000 to move into the bigger house while the other scrapes by not wanting anything more in his trailer home. One has all the gadgets and techno toys the other has only a small cassette player to listen to Hank Williams and Jimmy Rodgers. One will contribute and vote for the Greens while the other will vote for Republicans cursing the lot of them.

If you're ever in a jam call Levi. No questions asked.

The politics of our everyday lives.

I remember Chlamor bringing up another point that I think bears on this too - alot of these "liberals" are the most helpless people in the world. I used to see posts about auto repair on DU that were absolutely absurd - one guy was asking about his "racking pinion". Without all the services provided by their "inferiors" they would last a week, tops. Maybe their is some sort of complex behind that - deep down they have to be aware of their own limitations especially when it comes to technical skills..

Yep.

Remember the Green party advocate, who denied that the Green party was geared only to upscale professional people? He said that while his particular chapter was all professional people, that was only because in his area - Palo Alto - everyone was a software programmer, so naturally the Green party reflected that. I listed off about 50 blue collar jobs - "someone is scrubbing the toilets, someone is waiting table, someone is mowing the lawns..." and on and on. That had obviously never occurred to him. He looked right through people he saw everyday - they are invisible to him, they don't count in some way. This is how it is with most activists. "We" - as in "we want our country back!" - means the 5% of the population who are "like-minded" and just like us and then you have a bunch of other people who are extras in their drama - just a mob of unimportant and insignificant people, a demographic to be tricked and manipulated.

Nice polite well-off people believe that the statement "they treat us like dogs" is figurative, but it is not. It is a literally true statement. Right wingers advocate fear and discipline when training a dog. Liberals advocate love and kindness and treats to train a dog. The same differences apply when it comes to poor people and minority people. But in both cases, people are literally being treated and thought of as though they were dogs. The only difference is that dogs rank higher for liberals, because they are presumed to be more helpless and dependent than people, and don't sass back as much or demand equality. Thousands of dogs - refugees from Katrina - were adopted by well-off people in Michigan. No human beings were.


"Maybe their is some sort of complex behind that..."

Oh, sure. Resentment. The manual skills need to be looked down on, because competency threatens the egos of the posh winners. In this hatred for working class people, the liberals are much worse than the conservatives. If intellectuals had real work to do, they wouldn't feel so intimidated by people who are doing real things. But there is very little real or meaningful work for intellectuals.

Oh, sure. Resentment. The manual skills need to be looked down on, because competency threatens the egos of the posh winners. In this hatred for working class people, the liberals are much worse than the conservatives. If intellectuals had real work to do, they wouldn't feel so intimidated by people who are doing real things. But there is very little real or meaningful work for intellectuals.

Hah, Anax blames most of the history of muddled philosophy (and religion too I think) on intellectuals not having any "real work" to do. Which would be awesome just for the sake of novelty, but it also happens to seemingly be true..;)

Malcolm sez:

http://www.blackcommentator.com/230/230_images/91_x_2.gif


David Kramer and Levi Locke. Real names, real people. Two very good friends of mine, two on the opposite ends of the political spectrum. One is a radical lefty professor (with investments) while the other hasn't any teeth left speaks like a "dumb hillbilly" is openly racist (his daughter married "one of them") and delivers newspapers and cuts wood for a living. One just sold his old house for $250,000 to move into the bigger house while the other scrapes by not wanting anything more in his trailer home. One has all the gadgets and techno toys the other has only a small cassette player to listen to Hank Williams and Jimmy Rodgers. One will contribute and vote for the Greens while the other will vote for Republicans cursing the lot of them.

If you're ever in a jam call Levi. No questions asked.

The politics of our everyday lives.

Unforgettable, but thanks for the redux

I remember Chlamor bringing up another point that I think bears on this too - alot of these "liberals" are the most helpless people in the world. I used to see posts about auto repair on DU that were absolutely absurd - one guy was asking about his "racking pinion". Without all the services provided by their "inferiors" they would last a week, tops. Maybe their is some sort of complex behind that - deep down they have to be aware of their own limitations especially when it comes to technical skills..

Yep.

Remember the Green party advocate, who denied that the Green party was geared only to upscale professional people? He said that while his particular chapter was all professional people, that was only because in his area - Palo Alto - everyone was a software programmer, so naturally the Green party reflected that. I listed off about 50 blue collar jobs - "someone is scrubbing the toilets, someone is waiting table, someone is mowing the lawns..." and on and on. That had obviously never occurred to him. He looked right through people he saw everyday - they are invisible to him, they don't count in some way. This is how it is with most activists. "We" - as in "we want our country back!" - means the 5% of the population who are "like-minded" and just like us and then you have a bunch of other people who are extras in their drama - just a mob of unimportant and insignificant people, a demographic to be tricked and manipulated.

Nice polite well-off people believe that the statement "they treat us like dogs" is figurative, but it is not. It is a literally true statement. Right wingers advocate fear and discipline when training a dog. Liberals advocate love and kindness and treats to train a dog. The same differences apply when it comes to poor people and minority people. But in both cases, people are literally being treated and thought of as though they were dogs. The only difference is that dogs rank higher for liberals, because they are presumed to be more helpless and dependent than people, and don't sass back as much or demand equality. Thousands of dogs - refugees from Katrina - were adopted by well-off people in Michigan. No human beings were.


"Maybe their is some sort of complex behind that..."

Oh, sure. Resentment. The manual skills need to be looked down on, because competency threatens the egos of the posh winners. In this hatred for working class people, the liberals are much worse than the conservatives. If intellectuals had real work to do, they wouldn't feel so intimidated by people who are doing real things. But there is very little real or meaningful work for intellectuals.

Hey Daddio

You really should buy that book of Pisarev's collected essays. It positively fucks me up how much the two of you sound alike. It would be 50 self-edifying dollars for you to spend, I can tell you that.

Hey Daddio

You really should buy that book of Pisarev's collected essays. It positively fucks me up how much the two of you sound alike. It would be 50 self-edifying dollars for you to spend, I can tell you that.

That used to be the most amazing thing - Progress Publishers and Foreign Language Press (both in Moscow) used to publish real, leather bound editions of people like Pisarev for almost nothing. I think I bought Pisarev's selected essays for $3.00. You could go to NYC and buy a trunk load of books for almost nothing. I thought it was just subsidized propoganda for the "West" but then I went to Prague once, and the books were even cheaper - in English and in Czech. Apparently, they were price gouging in NYC.

Books (and not just political books but all kinds of shit) had been partly de-commoditized.

Very strange.

.

Hey Daddio

You really should buy that book of Pisarev's collected essays. It positively fucks me up how much the two of you sound alike. It would be 50 self-edifying dollars for you to spend, I can tell you that.

That used to be the most amazing thing - Progress Publishers and Foreign Language Press (both in Moscow) used to publish real, leather bound editions of people like Pisarev for almost nothing. I think I bought Pisarev's selected essays for $3.00. You could go to NYC and buy a trunk load of books for almost nothing. I thought it was just subsidized propoganda for the "West" but then I went to Prague once, and the books were even cheaper - in English and in Czech. Apparently, they were price gouging in NYC.

Books (and not just political books but all kinds of shit) had been partly de-commoditized.

Very strange.

.

What still shocks and surprises is how shitty the binding and typesetting are. This think looks like a tenth generation photocopy and the cover already wants to come loose in only a hundred pages...

Even so, it has been well worth the purchase IMO.

Journalist, revolutionary, philospher, materialist, the prototype “nihlist”, Pisarev spent most of his life in prison (without ever being charged) and died, in mysterious circumstances, immediately after his release at the obscene age of 28.[/i]

Why'd he get jailed? Or, rather, what specific events led to his jailing? I think we all can easily deduce the 'why' of it.


I just ran into the answer to this last week, quite by accident:

"He was then twenty-one (he was born in 1840). Chernyshevsky invited the youth to join the staff of Sovremennik, but Pisarev preferred to stay with another Petersburg monthly, Russkoe Slovo (The Russian Word), which soon became an influential organ of radical opinion.

The following year he was arrested. In a fit of indignation he had tossed off a vitriolic retort to a pamphlet against Herzen inspired by the police. 'The Romanov dynasty and the Petersburg bureaucracy,' he wrote, 'are ripe for the grave; all that is necessary is to give them the last push and cover their stinking corpses with mud.' Before the manuscript could be run off on an underground press it got into the hands of the authorities, and the author received a four-year prison term. It was from his cell in the Fortress of Peter and Paul that he contributed to Russkoe Slovo the brash, spirited commentaries and lay homilies that endeared him to a large segment of the intelligentzia...

'Here is the ultimatum of our camp: what can be smashed should be smashed; what will stand the blow is good; what will fly into smithereens is rubbish; at any rate, hit out right and left -- there will and can be no harm from it.' Thus said Pisarev in the early essay mentioned above. Such advice couched in such forthright language thrilled the radical youth. He went on employing his pen to discredit authority, tradition, all the pieties and taboos that restrain the individual."

Avrahm Yarmolinsky, Road to Revolution: A Century of Russian Radicalism, 1956.

It's a lousy book but it solves the mystery. As Kropotkin has already told us, he never was formally charged with any crime but he spent the rest of his short life in prison, nevertheless.



http://www.cartoonstock.com/lowres/csl0045l.jpg
.

I posted this long delayed historical blurb as a seperate thread and in 2 parts... available, here:

http://populistindependent.org/phpbb/vi ... =3947#3947 (http://populistindependent.org/phpbb/viewtopic.php?p=3947#3947)

.

http://www.amazon.com/Selected-Philosop ... 0830500898 (http://www.amazon.com/Selected-Philosophical-Social-Political-Essays/dp/0830500898)

And a kick for any lurkers :!:

Re-read

Dimitri Ivanovich Pisarev (Russian: Дмитрий Иванович Писарев; 14 October [O.S. 2 October] 1840 - 16 July [O.S. 4 July] 1868) was a radical Russian writer and social critic who, according to Georgi Plekhanov, "spent the best years of his life in a fortress".

Pisarev was one of the writers who propelled the democratic-revolutionary trend in Russia during the 1860's. The next generation of Russians, made famous by the events of 1905 and 1917, acknowledged Pisarev's influence. Nadezhda Krupskaya, Lenin's wife, once wrote, "Lenin was of the generation that grew up under the influence of Pisarev".

Pisarev wanted, more than anything else, an end to poverty and misery. This desire he pursued through philosophy, literary criticism and social and family analyses.

Lenin's quote from Pisarev:

"There are rifts and rifts," wrote Pisarev of the rift between dreams and reality. "My dream may run ahead of the natural march of events or may fly off at a tangent in a direction in which no natural march of events will ever proceed. In the first case my dream will not cause any harm; it may even support and augment the energy of the working men.... There is nothing in such dreams that would distort or paralyse labour-power. On the contrary, if man were completely deprived of the ability to dream in this way, if he could not from time to time run ahead and mentally conceive, in an entire and completed picture, the product to which his hands are only just beginning to lend shape, then I cannot at all imagine what stimulus there would be to induce man to undertake and complete extensive and strenuous work in the sphere of art, science, and practical endeavour....

The rift between dreams and reality causes no harm if only the person dreaming believes seriously in his dream, if he attentively observes life, compares his observations with his castles in the air, and if, generally speaking, he works conscientiously for the achievement of his fantasies. If there is some connection between dreams and life then all is well." Of this kind of dreaming there is unfortunately too little in our movement. And the people most responsible for this are those who boast of their sober views, their "closeness" to the "concrete", the representatives of legal criticism and of illegal "tail-ism".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dimitri_Pisarev

http://blog.lib.umn.edu/amin0037/amin/sketchbook2-thumb.jpg

"So for my final composition I decided to stick with the depiction of Dimitri Pisarev in the foreground, with Saint Basil's Cathedral in the background. After the activity we did last Tuesday I realized that a simple way to symbolize one person caring for another would be interlocked hands, lifting someone up. Since my figure was all about the well being of his fellow Russians, I think that the interlocked hands symbolize this connection pretty well."

Drawing found here:
http://blog.lib.umn.edu/amin0037/amin/2 ... ook_2.html (http://blog.lib.umn.edu/amin0037/amin/2008/02/paul_carroll_sketchbook_2.html)

It is worth kicking this again, not so much to reread Bees, which is now available in many different places, but to kick the conversation and commentary afterwords.