Nihilists, Narodniks, and the Importance of Pisarev

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Re: Nihilists, Narodniks, and the Importance of Pisarev

Post by kidoftheblackhole » Thu Jul 19, 2018 5:16 pm

Wish we could assemble even a small group that wanted to talk through some of this. Even if I didn't have the time, for a project like this I would make time.

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Re: Nihilists, Narodniks, and the Importance of Pisarev

Post by blindpig » Thu Jul 19, 2018 10:40 pm

kidoftheblackhole wrote:
Thu Jul 19, 2018 5:16 pm
Wish we could assemble even a small group that wanted to talk through some of this. Even if I didn't have the time, for a project like this I would make time.
It ain't like nobody is reading here, not many, but the views keep climbing.
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: Nihilists, Narodniks, and the Importance of Pisarev

Post by blindpig » Mon Jan 21, 2019 2:01 pm

kick
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: Nihilists, Narodniks, and the Importance of Pisarev

Post by blindpig » Tue Jul 04, 2023 5:15 pm

blindpig wrote:
Thu Nov 30, 2017 6:58 pm
This is an abridged repost:

Nihilists, Narodniks, and the Importance of Pisarev
.

Part 1 of 2

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

http://www.marxist.com/bolshevism/part1-1.html
Quote Originally Posted by Woods
The phenomenon of the Russian Narodniks (“populists”, men of the people) was a consequence of the extreme belatedness of Russian capitalism. The decay of feudal society proceeded faster than the formation of the bourgeoisie. Under these conditions, sections of the intelligentsia, especially the youth, broke away from the nobility, bureaucracy and clergy and began to look for a way out of the social impasse. However, when they looked around for a point of support within society, they could not be attracted by the crude, backward and underdeveloped bourgeoisie, whilst the proletariat was still in its infancy, unorganized, politically untutored and small in numbers, particularly in comparison with the many millions of peasants who made up the dumb, oppressed and crushed majority of Russian society.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Going to the People’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

http://www.thebellforum.net/Bell2/www.t ... ml?t=47805
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"Accept no 'given wisdom'."

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Ask Who Benefits: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix


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It is the Republican Party’s job to expand the US military, rob and oppress the working class, serve US plutocrats, facilitate ecocidal capitalism, and foment division among the electorate. It is the Democratic Party’s job to do these same things while blaming it on Republicans.



One of the weirdest things to happen last year was the entire western political/media class deciding to start pretending Ukrainian Nazis aren’t Nazis based on literally nothing whatsoever, just because it’s convenient, and a substantial portion of the population playing along.

This is still happening, by the way.



Part of the problem is that westerners live in a pre-revolutionary society that we’ve been duped into believing is a post-revolutionary society. We self-righteously look down at our noses at other nations and pity their lack of freedom and political sophistication, when in actuality we’re all deeply enslaved and the global south is the only place where anything real has been happening politically.



The Wall Street Journal has a new article out about how US war veterans are no longer recommending their kids join the military, which is cutting the war machine off from an important recruitment “pipeline” because the children of military families make up the majority of military recruits.

I’ve seen a lot of right wingers sharing the article with comments to the effect of “hurr hurr, that’s what you get for having a woke military,” but they plainly didn’t read the article, because it lists many factual and entirely valid reasons why military families have stopped steering this new generation toward military careers, and none of them have anything to do with “wokeness”. Here are some excerpts:

“After the patriotic boost to recruiting that followed 9/11, the U.S. military has endured 20 years of war in Iraq and Afghanistan with no decisive victories, scandals over shoddy military housing and healthcare, poor pay for lower ranks that forces many military families to turn to food stamps, and rising rates of post-traumatic stress disorder and suicide.”
“Deeper problems soldiers report include moldy barracks, harassment, lack of adequate child care and not enough support for mental health issues such as suicide.”
“Families or those who live off base can find expenses outstrip income. More than 20,000 active-duty troops are on SNAP benefits, otherwise known as food stamps, according to federal data.”
Recruiters are struggling to meet their goals, partly due to veterans not recommending their kids enlist because it’s a shitty job no loving parent would wish upon their children, and partly because the US war machine can’t compete with Carl’s Jr.

One recruiter is quoted as saying “To be honest with you it’s Wendy’s, it’s Carl’s Jr., it’s every single job that a young person can go up against because now they are offering the same incentives that we are offering, so that’s our competition right now.”

I view these as positive developments. Hopefully everyone stops enlisting in the world’s most murderous military.



Everyone got mad at the Boy Scouts of America because they groomed boys for sexual molestation when they were supposed to be grooming them to murder impoverished foreigners in the US military.



Ask who benefits from the continued emphasis on electoral systems that never succeed in bringing about real change.

Ask who benefits from the continued emphasis on culture wars over class war.

Ask who benefits from people being continually herded into two mainstream political factions which both support empire, oligarchy and authoritarianism.

Ask who benefits from the mass media continually focusing on the misdeeds of nations their government doesn’t like while ignoring their own government’s abuses of the needful, the marginalized and the disobedient.

Ask who benefits from ordinary people being too busy getting the bills paid to learn about what’s going on in the world.

Ask who benefits from those who ask these questions being labeled crackpots and conspiracy theorists.

Ask who benefits from the widespread assumption that how things are is the only way they can be.

Ask who benefits from the widespread assumption that the status quo is inevitable and resistance is futile.

Ask who benefits from your beliefs about what’s possible and what’s impossible.

Ask who benefits from each of your beliefs about the world.

Ask who benefits from each of your beliefs about humankind.

Ask who benefits from each of your beliefs about yourself and how you should be.

Ask who benefits from these beliefs not just among the powerful, but among the people you know in your own life. Who put that belief in your mind, and why might they have done so?

Any time you are presented with a narrative about how things are in a way that asks you to believe it, question who would benefit from that belief, whether it’s a large-scale narrative about the world, or a small-scale narrative about yourself and your own life

https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2023/07/03 ... ve-matrix/

For a refresher on Pisarev's Bees - http://www.thebellforum.net/forums/view ... ?f=3&t=218
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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