What is ‘makhaevism'?

Abstract

When the Short Course history of the Communist party was published in Pravda in 1938, it was accompanied by a decree which emphasized the role of the intelligentsia in the construction of Soviet society. The decree bitterly condemned the ‘Makhaevist’ belief that the intellectuals — party officials, factory and farm managers, army officers, technical specialists, scientists — were an alien breed of self-seeking men who had nothing in common with the worker at the bench or the peasant behind the plough. This hostile attitude towards the intelligentsia, declared the decree, was ‘savage, hooligan and dangerous to the Soviet State’. A number of Pravda readers, puzzled by the strange expression ‘Makhaevism’, wrote to the editors asking them to explain it. (Some readers, it seems, confused ‘Makhaevism’ with ‘Machism’, the philosophy of the Austrian physicist Ernst Mach, which Lenin had severely criticized thirty years earlier.) In a scathing polemic, Pravda replied that ‘Makhaevism’ was a crude theory which slandered the intelligentsia by branding them as the new exploiters of the workers and peasants; its adherents were ‘aliens, degenerates, and enemies’, whose slogan was ‘Downwith the intelligentsia’. Vehemently denying that the intelligentsia constituted a new class of oppressors, Pravda asserted that the intellectuals and the toiling masses were ‘of one bone and one flesh’. Yet Pravda’s barrage of vituperation merely thickened the mist of confusion surrounding the term ‘Makhaevism’, which, by the 1930s, had become little more than a convenient epithet for intellectual-baiting. But what, in fact, was ‘Makhaevism’? Who was its originator, and what influence did he have during his lifetime? Jan Waclaw Machajski was born in 1866 in Busk, a small town of some two thousand inhabitants, situated near the city of Kielce in Russian Poland. He was the son of an indigent clerk, who died when Machajski was a child, leaving a large and destitute family. Machajski attended the gimnaziya in Kielce and helped support his brothers and sisters by tutoring the schoolmates who boarded in his mother’s apartment. He began his revolutionary career in 1888 in the student circles of Warsaw University, where he had enrolled in the faculties of natural science and medicine. Two or three years later, while attending the University of Zurich, he abandoned his first political philosophy (a blend of socialism and Polish nationalism) for the revolutionary internationalism of Marx and Engels. Machajski was arrested in May 1892, for smuggling revolutionary proclamations from Switzerland into the industrial city of Łodź, which was then, in the throes of a general strike. In 1903, after a dozen years in prison and Siberian exile, he escaped to western Europe, where he remained until the outbreak of the 1905 revolution. During his long term of banishment in the Siberian settlement of Vilyuisk (in Yakutsk province), Machajski made an intensive study of socialist literature and came to the conclusion that the Social Democrats did not really champion the cause of the manual workers, but that of a new class