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He created one of the more interesting storms in Russia's revolutionary period from 1898 to 1918. Having built it up, he remained the eye of that storm for a goodly part of those twenty years. And he did this when, himself a revolutionary and an intellectual, he passionately declared and stubbornly repeated that revolutionary intellectuals should not be trusted by the non-intellectual proletarians in whose name they presumed to speak. A Marxist so much of his early adult life, he said that Marxists in particular should be distrusted.
He was a Pole, steeped in the culture of his country's Russian conquerors almost as deeply as in his native Polish thought, language, literature, and politics. His name was Jan Waclaw Machajski, pronounced Makhaisky. His fellow revolutionaries, whom he attacked so furiously, coined the derogatory, spiteful epithet makkayevskditoa (Makhayevism) to degrade his ideas. To this day, the Soviet press occasionally revives this awful term at the least inkling that something like his argument may reappear anywhere in the Soviet Union, in whatever faint accents or camouflaged form.
1 L. Syrkin, Makhayevshdiina (Makhayevisnt) (Moscow-Leningrad, 1931), p. 4, mentions Pinczow and 1867. N.N.Baturin (pseudonym of N.Zamiatin),inhis essay "Pamiati Makhayevsh-chiny" ("Remembering Makhayevism") in the book Sodiineniya (Works) (Moscow, 1930), p. 352, distorts the town's name to "Pin do v." Mrs. Machajski's statements are quoted by me on the basis of her memoir on Machajski's early life (up to 1903), which manuscript (in Russian) is now in the files of Max Nomad of New York, to whose kindness in letting me consult it I am greatly obligated. My talks with Mr. Nomad about his old mentor, Machajski* were of much aid to me in the preparation of this essay.
Some of the group's literature came from Austrian Poland. In 1891, while trying to smuggle the books and brochures into Russian Poland, Machajski was arrested by die Austrian police. After four months in the Cracow prison he was expelled from the country. He moved to Zurich in Switzerland, the traditional center of political emigres from Eastern Europe. He enrolled at the Zurich University, but devoted more time to emigre arguments than to study.
Crossing into Russian Poland with a shipment of the leaflet, Machajski never delivered it to the Lodz workers: he was arrested on the Russo-German border by the Tsarist police. According to revolutionary Russian sources, he was then a member of the Polish Socialist Party,* founded in 1892 by Josef Pilsudski and a few other young revolutionaries. Pilsudski had that very year returned from five years of Siberian exile. Born eleven months apart, both Machajski and Pilsudski were 25 years old in 1892.
3 On the relationship between Zeromski and Machajski, see Max Nomad, Dreamers, Dynamiters, and Demagogues (New York: Waldon Press, 1964), pp. 35 and 133; also Marshall Shatz, "Jan Waclaw Machajski, the 'Conspiracy' of the Intellectuals," Survey, London, No. 62 (January 1967), pp. 45-46, quoting two Polish sources, one of them by Zeromski himself.
5 Viktor Chernov, Konstruktlvnyl sotstalizm (Constructive Socialism), I (Prague: Volia Roseii Publishing House, 1925), 99.
He was eager for further strengthening of his Marxist faith through talks with fellow-exiles and reading of whatever books he could find in Siberia. He considered himself extremely lucky: one of the exiles had managed to bring along a whole library of Socialist literature in several languages, and this Machajski began to devour.
He took part in the discussions and writings of the time on the latest sensation: the ideas of the German Social-Democrat, Eduard Bernstein, who in the 1890s and later undertook to criticize and revise Karl Marx by stating that class war was not at all inevitable, that a Marx-predicted social revolution was not in the offing, since the emergence of many small fortunes was taking the place of the extreme concentration of capital forecast by Marx, and that proletarians could improve their lives through labor unions and parliaments. The fiery revolutionary that Machajski was, he naturally joined those who ridiculed and attacked Bernstein.
Yet, almost in the next breath, Machajski himself was destined to become non-Marxist, nay, anti-Marxist, in a way all his own. According to his widow, already in his Zurich days he had assailed those of his Polish friends who would use the workers and the ideas of Socialism merely to win independence of Poland from the Tsar and then to run Poland for themselves, not for the workers and other masses. As Marshall Shatz points out, "this was his first lesson in the intelligentsia's 'exploitation' of Socialism for its own political purposes, a notion which subsequently became the cornerstone of Makhayevism." 7 But this repudiation of all the radical intellectuals and their revolutionary protestations, not only Polish but also Russian, German, and the rest, came in his Siberian exile.
It was there, in 1898, that he wrote and hectographed the first of his three pamphlets, all three of which he entitled Umstvemyl rabodiii (The Intellectual Worker). The second part of the series was written and hectographed in 1899.Some historical Russian sources insist that the third part was issued also in 1899 in Siberia, but more reliably Max Nomad says that Part III was printed (not hectographed) in Geneva, Switzerland, in 1904.8 It was about this time, in1904, that Machajski began to use a literary pseudonym - A. Volsky.
6 Chernov (ibid., I, 99) mistakenly stated that Verkhoyansk, farther North, was Machaj-iki's place of exile.
8 Max Noma.d, "MaAajski, Waclaw," Encyclopaedia of tUe Social Sciences (New York: the Macmillan Company), IX (1933), 655.
Marxists and other self-professed revolutionary intellectuals only pretended to be fighters for the proletariat and other oppressed masses. Most, if not all, such intellectuals never really cared for the masses. They were only using the workers and other poor folk to advance themselves as intellectuals, as professionals, as managers, to positions of selfish prosperity and power.
Machajski further wrote that these Marxists and other would-be revolutionaries wanted to bring down the structure of private capitalism, not to usher in a paradise of equality, of justice for workers and farmers, but to put themselves into the seats of power after they had dislodged the private capitalists. Instead of private capitalists, these intellectuals were going to introduce state capitalism, he declared, with themselves as the self-aggrandizing bosses and sole beneficiaries of the new system. He called these intellectuals "a rising privileged class, fighting for a place in the sun against the old privileged classes, the landed owners and capitalists." They too, he said, had a kind of capital. This capital was their higher education, "the source of their actual or potential higher incomes."
And they were not going to surrender this capital for the common good as they implied or professed, as they protested or promised they would.
No, in reality they were going to use their capital - this higher education of theirs - to snare all the workers into a revolt against the owning classes, whose seats of power these Marxists and other intellectuals coveted. They did not mean Socialism, even as they preached Socialism.
9 L. Trotsky, "Vospominaniya b moyei pervoi sibirskoi ssylke" ("Recollections of my first Siberian exile"). Katorga i ssylka (Hard labor and exile), Moscow, no. 5, 1923, pp. 91-95. See also Vera Machajski's memoir; and Nomad,Dreamers, Dynamiters and Demagogues, p. 165.
Tbus we see Madiajski as a unique prophet indeed. This Polish intellectual pre-dieted with startling clarity and truth the regime into which the so-called Socialism of the Russian Communists has been transformed, not alone in Russia, but also in Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, China, and all the other countries seized or influenced by them.
But what of the positive side of Machajski's argument? What did he propose in lieu of what the Marxists and other intelligenty preached? In brief, he would leave both action and triumph to workers only, and not a whit to intellectuals. The workers' action should consist of strikes and economic demands, which in due course would force the governments to retreat and create laws dictated by workers. The workers would compel the bourgeoisie to improve the workers' wages and living conditions to a point where the proletarian offspring would get higher schooling, too. And once everyone was truly educated, a thoroughly stateless and equal society would arise. There would be no have-nots in any sense whatever. Envy and strife would cease. All, all would be haves, and it would be mainly this equal access to education which would bring about the ideal egalitarian society. So said Madiajski.
Most importantly, Madiajski saw no special commanding role for his followers, his organization, even in the phase of transition from capitalism to his picture of paradise on earth.
His five-year Siberian exile term was up in 1900, and that summer Madiajski was allowed to start for European Russia. But en route he was re-arrested. He was mistaken for Yury Steklov, the Social-Democrat and future Bolshevik editor of Izvestiya, who had recently fled from his Siberian exile. The error cleared up, there was nonetheless no freedom for Madiajski, for at the time of his arrest dozens of copies of his hectographed pamphlets had been found in his luggage. Machajski's authorship of the pamphlets had apparently been known to the gendarmerie. Now, with the material evidence in their hands, the Tsarist authorities bunched a new case against him.
10 In English, Machajski's text has so far been presented in a brief excerpt, "On the Expropriation of the Capitalists," in V. F. Calverton, ed., The Making of Society, an Outline of Sociology (New York: Random House, the Modern Library, 1937), pp. 427-436. An objective summary of Machajski's views is given by Marshall Shatz, loc. cit., passim. Clear expositions of Machajski's doctrine, but in their spirit ranging from friendly to critical (at any rate, never truly objective), are given in Nomad's writings. The friendly tone is apparent in Nomad, Rebels and Renegades (New York: the Macmillan Company, 1932), pp. 206-208, 213, 239; also in the already cited biographical article in Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences, IX, 654-655. The critical tone is evident in Nomad's Dreamers, Dynamiters, and Demagogues of more than three decades later, passim. My own book, The New Class Divided (New York: the Macmillan Company, 1966), pp. 7-8, states Machajski's philosophy insofar as it attacks the Marxist intellectuals of his time, but not his prescriptive program.
He was jailed at Irkutsk, Central Siberia. The revolutionary exiles residing in that city, although opposing the sharp message of Machajski's Intellectual Worker, "were very friendly to him as a person."11 They raised 5,000 rubles as his bond, and in 1901 he was released. He was allowed to live in Irkutsk in comparative freedom, although under police surveillance. At this time he was described by his foes as a possessor of "the zeal of a self-educated person and the self-confidence of a pedant,"12 and by his friends as a well-built man of medium height, a thin beard on his energetic face lit by "the eyes of a Polish revolutionary fanatic." 13 Even while they argued against his anti-intellectualism, his opponents among his fellow exiles did indeed like him. For, very much unlike his dour text, his speech was often gay and his manner at times smiling. Besides, he had something of a reputation as a skillful and accommodating cook, a hardy vodka-drinker, an eager chess-player, and something of a practical joker.
13 P. A. Garvi (Garvy), Vospommamya sotsialdemokrata (Recollections of a Social-Democrat) (New York, 1946), pp. 287-318.
17 Trotsky, Moya zkizn': opyt avtobiografii (My life: an essay in autobiograpUy). I (Berlin, 1930), 167.
18 Nomad, Dreamers, Dynamiters, and Demagogues, p. 165. M Syrkin, p. 7.
19 I. I. Genkin, "Sredi preyemnikov Bakunina" ("Among Bakunin's Heirs"), Krasnaya le-topis' (Red Annals), Moscow, No. 1 (22), 1927, pp. 188 and 190.
Similar groups of Machajski's followers, inspired by a more lasting opposition to intellectuals, were founded in Yekaterinoslav in the Ukraine and at Vilno and Be-lostok in the West. The Belostok group was particularly active. During the abortive revolution, St. Petersburg in 1905-06 and Warsaw in 1906 were sites of yet stronger groups of the "Makhayevtsy." The St. Petersburg organization was led by Vera Gurari and Rafail Margolin.21 Both were Jews, and Margolin was a young worker. It was interesting to note that many a young Jewish worker, although possibly with die traditional respect hie race feels for education, did not trust the politics of those who had education, particularly if these happened to be Socialist politics.
The going for Machaj ski's ideas was tough, however. One reason for the failure of Machajski's ideas to expand and consolidate their grip on Russia's workers was the fierce opposition to his startling sermon on the part of practically all the active revolutionary intellectuals of the time. Socialists of all parties and groupings were aghast at Machajski's teachings. They at once mobilized the entire corps of their theoretical publicists, orators, and agitators. The whole propaganda apparatus of the Socialist movement, be it Bolshevik, Memshevik, or Socialist Revolutionary, went into action against this new common enemy. The virulence of their attack was unprecedented.
The mildest of these anti-Machajski arguments had to do with so-called "econo-mism": his opponents saw in some of his philosophy a clear - and deplorable I -kinship to the revisionism of Bernstein and other advocates of the need for workers' immediate economic improvement, the ideas Machaj ski himself had criticized in the first part of The Intellectual Worker.
His answer to the charge was that surely he stood for an immeasurably stronger revolutionary line of action than Bernstein and his ilk did. He called workers to the barricades, while the Bernsteinians did not. Those German revisionists, along with some of their timid Russian admirers, wanted to enhance the workers' lot through trade-unions and parliaments, but Macfaajski bristled with an aggressive anti-labor-unionism and anti-parliamentarism. To him. the trade union movement and the intellectuals' love for parliaments meant only soft jobs which intellectuals wanted for themselves at the expense of the gullible proletariat.
Some Socialists took a sober look at their own movement, and blamed themselves for whatever limited influence Machajski's ideas had achieved among certain declassed intellectuals, unemployed artisans, and restless workers of Russia (an influence that increased during the period of reaction that followed the revolution of 1905). In the 1920s, looking back. Communist commentators explained this success not as the result of the inherent quality of Makhayevism but as a temporary triumph-by-default.
The Communist went on to explain that the intellectuals manning the underground headquarters surrounded themselves with the trappings of such rigid conspiracy that workers ceased to see them. Thus came the alienation Used so cleverly by Machajski and his followers in their campaign. An effective answer would have been to bring enough proletarians into the underground committees, but this was not done at the time, not even by the most alert of the Bolsheviks.
22 Baturin, p. 354. Baturin's essay in Sodtinenlya is a reprint of his obituary of Machajski, which originally appeared in the Moscow Pravda for March 2, 1926 (no. 50).
24 Sergei G. Pushkarev, "1917 — A Memoir," The Russian Review, XXVI (Hanover, New Hampshire, January 1967), 65-66.
25 Konstantin Paustovsky, Povest' о zhiznl (Narrative of my life), II (Moscow, 1962), 154.
Particularly in the first revolution, of 1905-06, this primitive hostility to the odikastyie, the eyeglass-wearing intellectuals, was strong among the plain folk. In the reactionary outbursts of street violence led by the hooligans, by the Black Hundred "patriots/' and by the burly janitors and butcher-shop assistants, the targets and the victims were usually Jews and students, and often their telltale characteristics included their eyeglasses. Machajski was accused by his opponents of applauding the hoodlum enemies of Russia's intellectuals. He was charged with anti-intellectual hooliganism, and although there was never any actual political union between his followers (who after all counted in their ranks a number of intellectuals, Jewish or not) and the Black Hundreds, a common strain of distrust for intellectuals can be detected both among Machajski's adherents and the pogrom-bent ignoramuses.
But another alliance could be, and was, proved by Machajski's foes - the alliance between his teachings and organization and those of the anarchists. Some anarchists of the era, and a few later researchers, thought they detected the influence of Michael Bakunin's writings upon Machajski. None could find any direct connection to Bakunin, less so an open acknowledgement of such a debt, in any of Machajski's texts. The alliance between Machajski's followers and the anarchists developed from the warm sympathy felt for him by the anarchists of his time perhaps more than from any of his own statements. While he attracted anarchists of various schools, he in fact attacked them - as he abused all the other faiths and causes. But they listened to him, and some finally came over to join him.
26 Such attacks on Machajski can be found in the already cited works of Baturin, Chernov, Genkin, and Syrkin, also in R. V. Ivanov-Razumnik, Chto takoye makhayevshdtma? (What Is Makhayevism?), St. Petersburg, 1908,passim, as well as the two articles on Machajski and his movement in Bol'shaya sovetskaya entsiklopediya (Great Soviet Encyclopedia), XXXVIII (Moscow, 1938), 494, and 2nd edition, XXVI (Moscow, 1954), 544.
An outstanding case of Machajski's magnetism winning over an anarchist was rhnt involving Max Nomad.
27 Nomad, Dreamers, Dynamiters, and Demagogues, p. 35.
30 Dreamers, Dynamiters, and Demagogues, p. 105.
Followers and doubters, friends and opponents sought him out, and he overwhelmed all with his intense and bitter arguments. At his first meeting with Nomad, knowing that Nomad was an anarchist, Machajski ranted against anarchism and syndicalism so aggressively that Nomad was repelled, and would not discuss any issues with him for a long time after.
The bibliography of Machajski's works in his Geneva period is often stated in a rather contradictory manner. It is, however, certain that all three parts of The Intellectual Worker were reprinted on Janina's money in their original Russian, but with some meaningful revisions and additions by the author, in Geneva in 1904-05. Meanwhile the first Russian revolution created the temporary semi-free conditions which made it possible for Parts I and II to be reprinted in St. Petersburg in 1906. The publisher was one V. Yakovenko-Pavlenkov.
Machajski's widow in her memoir states that he published both Bankrotstvo sot-slallzma XIX stoletiya (Bankruptcy of Nineteenth Century Socialism) and Burzhuaz-naya revolyutsiya i rabocheye delo (The Bourgeois Revolution and the Workers' Cause) in Geneva in 1905. Max Nomad confirms this and adds that in St. Petersburg in 1906 the Russian edition of The Holy Family by Marx and Engels contained Machajski's "Primedianiya perevodchika" ("Notes by Translator"). In 1908 Machajski's Rabochii zagovor (The Workers' Conspiracy) was published in Geneva,34 and in this text he for the first time rather fully explored the problem of actual tactics to be followed by his adherents.
34 Vera Machajski's memoir, also Nomad's biography of Machajski in Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, IX, 655, bibliography.
Machajski returned to Russia in 1906. But he was one year too late. The Tsarist forces were gaining the upper hand; revolutionaries were being arrested, deported to Siberia, and many hanged or shot. To avoid the net, Madiajski returned to Geneva either late in 1907 or early 1908.
Nomad himself worked with Machajski until about 1910, when other and less violent ideas than Machajski's began to occupy him. Nomad would remain a radical but of a more contemplative type. He was also beginning to suspect Machajski of wanting precisely the thing Jan Waclaw was accusing the Marxists and other intellectuals of wishing and plotting for: power. In decades to come Nomad formulated this suspicion: " . if the movement led by Machajski's organization was strong enough to 'dictate the law' to the government, then it might also be strong enough to overthrow that government, whereupon the leaders of 'our' secret organization might seize power and establish their own dictatorship." 36 There was in Nomad, for years, enough of his original "pure" anarchism not to wish anyone's government, less so dictatorship, over people. And thus did Nomad, Machajski's most influential adherent, leave the movement.
In Russia, far more publicized than Max Nomad, Yevgeny Lozinsky was for a time considered Machajski's most articulate and active disciple. Lozinsky, also an intellectual, hardly ever acknowledged his spiritual debt to the master, but pretended to pursue an independent cause. His ideas, however, were in essence a striking echo of Machajski's arguments, and this was particularly clear from Lozinsky's two books on the intelligentsia and the achievements and prospects of the labor movement, published in St. Petersburg in 1907 and 1909.
But soon afterwards this apostle, too, left Machajski's fold.
35 Dreamers, Dynamiters, and Demagogues, pp. 133 and 35.
Madiajski was living in Paris and working in a bank when the news of the overthrow of Tsarism came in March 1917.
Within a few months, along with other political emigres, he returned to Russia and again tried to write and publish. Always more radical than moderate Socialists, he accepted the Bolshevik takeover of November of that year, but with grave reservations, of course. In the summer of 1918, in Moscow, he published a little magazine Rabodtaya revolyutsiya (The Workers' Revolution), which did not last beyond its first issue, in which he Aided the Bolsheviks for being entirely too slow in expropriating the bourgeoisie. He felt that they, no less than the moderate Socialists who had preceded them, lived up to his forecasts: here was a new bureaucracy, composed of intellectuals and some so-called "advanced" workers, interested in their own newly-acquired power rather than that of the proletariat.
He took a minor editorial and research job with the Communists, nonetheless. At that post, as copy editor of Narodnoye khoziaistvo (People's Economy), later renamed SotsialisticUeskoye khoziaistvo, the journal of the Supreme Council of People's Economy, he worked quietly until February 19, 1926, when he died of angina pectoris.37 He was then 59 years old. For the last eight years of his life, after the summer of 1918, he had been politically silent.
He died (as Marshall Shatz rightly notes) "peacefully but, ironically enough, as one of those 'intellectual workers' he had previously singled out as the foremost enemy of the working class." 38 And it was lucky for him that he did not live in the Soviet Union some ten years longer: he was not bothered by Stalin's secret police in the 1920s, for Stalin was then intent on badgering and removing bigger game than Machajski; but Madiajski would have surely been purged had he survived into the 1930s, when hardly a single non-conformist - no matter how unimportant or obscure - was overlooked by the arresting and shooting squads.
Machajski's death was noted with some show of sympathy and sorrow in just one Russian publication. This was the periodical of the Russian anarchist emigres in Paris.39 The two obituaries in the official Soviet press (Izvestiya of February 24 and Pravda of March 2) were a curious mixture of sneer and grudging respect.
37 A. Shetlikh, "Pamiati V. K. Makhaiskogo" ("In Memory of V. K. Machajski"), Izvestiya, Moscow, February 24, 1926.
39 P. A(rshinov), "Pamiati V. K. Makhaiskogo," Delo truda (The Cause of Labor), Paris, no. 11 (April 1926), pp. 5-8.
His widow in Moscow was allowed to exist unmolested, at the state's modest expense, on the official grounds that she had once been a fighter against the Tsarist regime. In 1934 Max Nomad, knowing that he would not be permitted by Stalin's government to re-visit the Soviet Union (for he had two years earlier published his book Rebels and Renegades, which he was certain could not be liked by Stalin), arranged for Janina to invite Vera to visit her in France. Nomad and Machajski's widow spent this last meeting, reminiscing about the past and going over the fine points of Machajski's doctrine.40 From this year dates Vera's invaluable memoir of Jan Waclaw's early life, penned in her miniature handwriting, now in Max Nomad's archives and made available by him to those researchers who come to his New York apartment with their questions on Machajski.
It was in 1933, the year before his trip to Western Europe, that Nomad published n brief appraisal of Machajski's life and work in The Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences, and it was still a friendly view, despite the fact that he had not been the master's follower since about 1910. But from the middle 1930s on, certainly after his last talk with Vera, Nomad was increasingly critical of his former mentor.
In official Soviet writings for the two decades up to Stalin's death in March 1953, Machajski's memory was attacked with increasing ferocity - on the rare occasions when it was at all mentioned. The vicious onslaught was kept up even in the relatively relaxed post-Stalin times. One year after Stalin's demise, "Makhayevism" was castigated as "counter-revolutionary" and "reactionary" in its "slander of the revolutionary intelligentsia." The aim of Machajski's teachings was described as "inciting enmity" between the intelligentsia and the working class. Yet this official statement of 1954 admitted that Machajski's ideas had some following in Red Russia as late as 1938.42 And even as late as February 1965 a high Kremlin propagandist writing in Pravda on the relations between the Party and the intelligentsia found it necessary to castigate "Makhayevism" once more, ostensibly as a long-outdated phenomenon.43 But if outdated, why was it necessary to drag it out? Apparently the Party hierarchy was not too sure that the Machajski prediction was outdated or otherwise laughable.
40 Dreamers, Dynamiters, and Demagogues, pp. 201-205.
42 Unsigned, "Makhayevshchina," Bol'shaya sovetskaya entsiklopediya, 2nd ed., XXVI (1954), 544. This Soviet encyclopedia, in both its editions (1938 and 1954), gives the year of Machajski's death incorrectly as 1927 instead of 1926. In my book The New Class Divided I unfortunately repeated this error of the Soviet encyclopedia.
43 A. Rumiantsev, "Partiya i intelligentsiya" ("The Party and the Intelligentsia"), Pravda, February 21, 1965.
The fact is that the hatred of the have-nots against the haves is today as current among the Russians as ever. Those lowly folk who feel they are barred from education still sullenly resent the educated. The Soviet press now and then finds it necessary to assure its readers, in reply to their querulous letters to the editor, that some day everybody will indeed be educated and that at that happy point there will be no distinction whatever between menial and mental workers - that in that blissful future there will be no such thing as menial work. There will be no workers - everyone will be an engineer!
Meanwhile, people who wear glasses are still suspect to the lower classes. Except that the old Russian word for them has changed. It is no longer odtkastyte. The new eyeglass-wearing intellectual is called odtkartk. But the bitterness, the distrust, the jealousy are still in that widely used term. That which Jan Waclaw Machajski discerned in the plebeian psyche of old Russia, and made his main premise, is still alive in the Soviet Union.

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