Infinite Journey

Hi whenever and wherever you are.

As you may know this clip is about James H. Billington's book: "Fire in the Minds of Men. Origins of the Revolutionary Faith". I have been listening Aaron Franz podcast series about this particular book and decided to upload it on youtube and "improve" podcast by adding at least some text to it.

So in this clip hopefully you are going to hear Aaron Franz's personal notes and quotes of this book and you are going to see (hopefully) a little bit extended text version of his quotes of "Fire in the Minds of Men".

If you would like just to listen to mp3 version (besides there are 4 parts about this book) -- theageoftransitions.com/index.php/component/content/article/51-feedburner/405-fire-in-the-minds-of-men-book-notes-trr92

If you would to read this incredible stuff -- ge.tt/7w0fWuD1/v/0

If you would like to read just a text from this clip-- http://leavethematrixnow.blogspot.com/2014/09/fire-in-minds-of-men-origins-of.html

Good luck for expanding you horizons :D

I also would like to quite a very intriguing text about a power of the MASK: “The terrorist tradition... left behind to Russia was both anarchistic and authoritarian. It was

Anarchistic in its determination to "disorganize" and destroy all existing state power. It was

authoritarian in its reliance on a disciplined, hierarchical organization to accomplish the task.

Thus, the People's Will left a deeply divided legacy... The combination created a fatal

fascination. [...]

Alexander Ulyanov, Lenin's older brother... helped form in I886 in St . Petersburg a new Terrorist

Fraction of the People's Will... young Ulyanov was a pure acolyte of the radical, scientistic

Intelligentsia when he turned to help organize the Terrorist Fraction of the People's Will, the first

political group anywhere to call its members "terrorists."... But for all his scientism, Ulyanov was

committed to bombs. [...]

the omnipresent uniforms guarding him (the tsar) henceforth continued to be challenged-as in

primitive societies-by the power of the mask. The mask gave an ordinary man a new identity; an

anonymity that bred fear and uncertainty; a public "image" that was grotesque, yet awesome and

bigger than life. Unlike the uniforms of power that-however oppressive-at least defined clear roles,

the new revolutionary mask destroyed all links with the familiar and the predictable, all loyalty and

accountability to normal human society. The mask was part of the equipment of the professional

revolutionary in Russia already in the 1860s. [...]

After Ulyanov and his fraction were crushed in 1887, a mask could not be worn in the great urban

centers of St. Petersburg and Moscow, where police controls made terrorist organization almost

impossible... the mask had returned north to reestablish links with the radical student subculture

in St. Petersburg through Ulyanov's younger brother, Lenin. [...]

Behind the new mask of Marxism was the old figure of a revolutionary intellectual establishing

political authority through the incantation of scientism and populism and the tactics of terrorism.

The term anarchism became popular in the West at precisely the time when Russian

revolutionaries were tending to abandon it in favour of terrorism. The most widely read

emigre writers about the Russian revolutionary movement (Kropotkin and Kravchinsky)

had left Russia when terroristic tactics were still identified with the "disorganization"

of state power and before the People's Will formed as a kind of revolutionary counter-

state. They thus identified terroristic tactics with anarchistic ideals”

On his return to England, Barmby went wild with the new-found label. He founded a

Communist Propaganda Society (soon renamed the Universal Communitarian Society)

and a journal, The Promethean or Communitarian Apostle (soon renamed The

Communist Chronicle). He described communism as the "societarian science" and the

final religion of humanity. His Credo proclaimed: “...I believe...that the divine is

communism, that the demoniac is individualism...” (...) He called himself "Pontifarch of

the Communist Church," proclaimed the "religion of COMMUNISM [...]

[Barmby]: “In the future, government politics will be succeeded by industrial

administration.”

[Barmby]: ”In the holy Communist Church, the devil will be converted into God. And to

this conversion of Satan doth God call peoples... in that Communion of suffrages, of

works, and of goods both spiritual and material ... for these latter days.”

Thus, this pioneering communist proclaimed the death of the devil as decisively as later

Communists were to announce the death of God. [...]

communism probably would not have attracted such instant attention without this initial

admixture of Christian ideas. This infusion (1) made credible the inherently implausible

idea that a totally different social order was possible "on earth as it is in heaven"; (2)

convinced many that this new "Communist" order would fuse Babeuvist communaute

with Christian communion; and thus, (3) helped for the first time make a transnational

social ideal compelling to significant numbers of pious working people. (...) this turn to

religion would seem to represent a "progressive" stage in the development of

revolutionary movements-moving beyond the utopian experiments and speculations of

Fourierist and Saint-Simonian intellectuals. Religious ideas activated the moral and

social consciousness of a hitherto largely passive working class and helped secular

intellectuals "in the passage from utopia to reality." [...]

...by 1845, the tide was turning to precisely the irreligious communism that Barmby

feared. [...]

If the denial of God's heaven was essential to European revolutionary doctrine, so too

was the rejection of the belief in a heaven on earth in America. Throughout the

nineteenth century, Europeans had escaped defeated revolutions in the Old World by

fleeing to the land of successful revolution in the New. [...]

Cabet solicited the collaboration of both French and Germans in London for establishing

a communal center of five to twenty members to coordinate international propaganda for

communism. However, he soon conceived a plan for establishing a much larger

settlement in America. He turned his energy to enlisting twenty to thirty thousand

"communists" for a massive emigration to America. [...]

Cabet's project was, however, criticized by the Germans in London (Marx), who insisted

that communism be set up in Europe instead. (...) The only serious movement of social

revolutionaries to reach America was the First International, which, however, did not

arrive until 1872 after it had already fallen apart. [...]

The first attempt by communists to form a party and develop "party spirit" grew not out of

the old hopes of the New World, but out of new hopes in the Old World. [...]

Victor Considerant transformed Fourierism into a new socialist political movement by

changing the title of his journal from Phalange to Peaceful Democracy. He spoke of the

need for a "social party" to fulfil the needs of a "modern democracy." It was in rivalry to

Considerant's Manifesto of Peaceful Democracy that Karl Marx wrote his Communist

Manifesto late in 1847. Marx was seeking to create just such an ideological "social party"-

but it was to be revolutionary rather than peaceful, communist rather than socialist. Like

Considerant, however, Marx believed his new party would also be in some sense

democratic. It was the international organization of Fraternal Democrats in Brussels [...]

The original link between the Young Hegelians and the new generation of French social

revolutionaries had been Moses Hess. (...) As a Jew-and later a founding father of Zionism

-Hess lent to his belief in communism a messianic fervor looking forward not just to a

change of government but to a kind of political "end of days." [...]

Arnold Ruge began to give the Hegelian "party" a revolutionary political line by seeking to

"cleanse" Hegelianism of Hegel's own moderate liberalism and by urging Germany to

"transform liberalism into democracy." [...]

The man who came closest to fulfilling this task was Ruge's young journalistic protege,

Karl Marx. The decisive works in which it was performed were Marx's lengthy critique of

Hegel's The Philosophy of Right, written in the summer of 1843, and his introduction of

the following year to the same work. In criticizing Hegel's last and most political work,

Marx applied for the first time his so-called transformative method-reversing the role of

matter and spirit-to politics. In the introduction, he used "proletariat" and "communist"

for the first time as labels of liberation. [...]

...Hegel did see a universally liberating mission for the state and for its dedicated

"universal class"... [...]

(Marx) The liberating mission of the proletariat was, however, closely related to the

establishment of "true" democracy by universal suffrage. (...) Universal suffrage would

accompany and insure the advent of universal property. The abolition (also meaning

uplifting and transforming) of property would also involve the abolition of the state. [...]

The Hegelian concept of a "universal class" leading humanity to an earthly millennium...

Hess and Engels began denationalizing the revolutionary ideal by adding French and

English perspectives to those of the Berlin Hegelians. [...]

Marx urged, instead, deeper study of the causes of poverty and greater faith in the

universal mission of the Germ an proletariat. Members of the proletariat were to

become the theoreticians of the world proletarian movement just as the English were

to be its economic and the French its political leaders. [...]

The crucial new element that Marx brought to communism was dialectical materialism.

[...] Marx... was creating an ideology in the modern sense : a secular system of ideas

based on a theory of history that ultimately promised answers for all human problems.

Politically, the task of the proletariat was the conquest of democracy, which had been

compromised by liberalism. Ideologically, the mission was to realize the "human

emancipation" that lay beyond the purely political gains of past revolutions: to bring

into being what Marx described in his Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 as

"realized humanism" or "naturalism." By the time of his expulsion from Paris

early in 1845, Marx described both his and humanity's goal as "Communism." [...]

The crucial new element that Marx brought to communism was dialectical materialism.

[...] ... merger of elements from the two universal ideologies of the preceding era:

Saint-Simonianism and Hegelianism. [...]

Radical Hegelians also moved from idealism to philosophical materialism in the mid-

1840s. [...]

Marx introduced the dynamic idea of dialectical progression into this materialistic

monism. (...) dialectical materialism provided, paradoxically, an effective call to action.

[...] A third area of borrowing from the radical Hegelians was Marx's atheism.(...) In a

sense, Hegel had prepared the way by placing philosophy above religion, and by

subordinating all Gods to his own concept of an all-controlling "world spirit."

Contemporaries viewed this as tantamount to atheism; and "the vehemence of

attacks from religious quarters on Hegel can perhaps be compared to the reaction in

England to Darwin." (...) However religious in nature, Marx's ideology could never be

religious in name. The insistence that it was "scientific" helped protect it against the

ebb and flow of enthusiasm that plagued rival revolutionary doctrines. [...]

Feuerbach prepared the way for revolutionary atheism by inventing the Hegelian belief

that God created man out of his spiritual need to overcome divine alienation. Feuerbach

suggested that, on the contrary, man had created God out of his material need to

overcome human alienation. To Marx, this suggested that alienation was to be solved

not by spiritual, but by material forces. Both the source and the cure lay in political

economy; [...]

(Hess in the late 1 830s... attached special importance to Saint-Simonianism.) [...]

Weitling argued that the time was ripe for revolution, which could be made in alliance with

criminals and youth on the one hand and with kings and princes on the other. (...) Weitling

argued that "simple propaganda helps nothing," and would not be effective unless it

promised people a social revolution in their own lifetime. (...) Schapper, on the other hand,

said that communism must strengthen the ability "to develop oneself freely," and "a real

system will be developed by our new German philosophers ." [...]

... he (Engels) wrote that "Democracy in our days is Communism." Against this background

of association with bourgeois democrats rather than German workers, Engels used for the

first time the term "proletarian party." [...]

Marx and Engels turned for allies to Karl Schapper's group in London, the League of the

Just. [...]

The decision to change the name to Communist League (and the first use of the slogan

"Workers of the world, unite !") had emerged.. [...]

The tactic of cooperation with other democratic parties was spelled out in the fourth and

final section of Marx's Manifesto. Only communists could represent the true class interests

of the proletariat, but they needed to ally themselves with radical democratic parties in

advanced countries-and with agrarian revolutionaries in backward lands [...]

Disillusionment with the democratic label was soon to develop; but many believed in

1848 that communism was democracy in the social sphere. [...]

In the course of the 1840s, the word communism acquired a meaning distinct from

socialism. There was, to be sure, much confusion and overlapping. [...]

First, communism suggested more far-reaching social control than socialism-control

over consumption as well as production. [...] Second, communism was increasingly

associated with a scientific and materialistic worldview in contrast to moralistic and

idealistic socialism. (...) Attachment to the communal ideal required detachment from

everything else: a distaste bordering on revulsion for romantic sentimentality

(the degenerate form of moral idealism), and a militant opposition to belief in God (the

ultimate source of moral idealism). [...] Third, communism was widely associated with

political violence in a way that socialism seldom was. This identification was present

from the very beginning. (...) Communists argued that bourgeois society was already

doing violence to humanity. Precisely because the communists s aw themselves

building the final, violence free community, they felt justified in undertaking a final,

revolutionary act of violence. [...]

The small band of intellectuals that moved the social revolutionary camp toward

communism had one common characteristic: homelessness. [...]

The social revolutionaries who formed the Communist League in London were young,

uprooted, and largely denationalized intellectuals. [...]

On the Taiping rebellion, he (Marx) suggested in 1853 that: “the Chinese revolution

will throw the spark into the overloaded mine of the present industrial system and

cause the explosion of the long prepared general crisis, which, spreading abroad, will

be closely followed by political revolutions on the Continent.” [...]

The term proletariat came into modern use in the seventeenth century as a general,

contemptuous term for the lower classes. More positive connotations appeared in the

eighteenth century through Rousseau and some Babeuvists. [...]

Radicalized by his own arrest and trial in Cologne and then by the suppression of his

journal, Marx returned to London in the autumn of 1849 and reversed the opposition

he had expressed in the spring towards reconstituting the Communist League. [...]

Marx wrote in1850]: “Only when steeped in the blood of the June insurgents, did the

tricolor become transformed into the flag of the European Revolution-the red flag” [...]

The main immediate conclusion that Marx derived from the setbacks of 1848-49 was

that there was need for a revolutionary dictatorship to act on behalf of the proletariat.[...]

In April of 1850, Marx and Engels joined Harney and others in London to draw up plans

for the Universal League of Revolutionary Communists-a short-lived last effort to

transform the revived Communist League into a guiding force for secret revolutionary

organizations throughout Europe. The statutes of this organization contained the first

clear formulation of the concept of an interim "dictatorship of the proletariat": “overthrow

of all the privileged classes, the subjection of these classes to the dictatorship of the

proletariat by sustaining the revolution in permanence until the realization of

Communism, which has to be the final form of the organization of human society”. [...]

Marx first related the term "dictatorship of the proletariat" to his theory of history and

class struggle in March 1852. The Buonarrotian idea of a transitional elite dictatorship

was thus transformed into its "Marxist" form of class dictatorship as the necessary

preliminary to a classless society. [...] After 1 848 many revolutionary leaders had

discussed the need for some kind of dictatorship to defend revolutionary democracy

from counter-revolution. (...) The term (dictator) did not yet have its modern despotic

ring. [...]

The suggestion of Blanquist influence on Marx is anathema to later Marxists, who

seem committed both to exaggerating Marx's originality and to caricaturing "Blanquism."

Even when not subject to Soviet discipline, Marxists insist that Marx did not take the term

from Blanqui and used the term to contrast his "class dictatorship" with Blanqui's elitist

conception. Far from establishing a lack of Blanqui's influence, however, such usage only

indicates a deeper linkage. For Marx tended to denounce the ism behind an individual in

the act of borrowing his idea-just as he reviled the persona of a rival leader he was

seeking to displace. Adopting an idea from Blanqui created a compensatory need to

denounce "Blanquism."

Blanqui's influence on Marx during this period is further illustrated by Marx's taking over

of another term that was to become important in revolutionary history: permanent

revolution. Marx had rejected such a concept when it was suggested by working-class

leaders in Cologne during 1848-49; but he embraced "revolution in permanence" as

the "war cry" of the reorganized Communist League in March 1850.

The circulars sent from the London Central Committee to the German members of the

Communist League in March indicated that the classical Illuminist-Buonarrotian-Blanquist

type of conspiracy had taken root among Germans. Emissaries from London were

instructed to recruit people to the league from within existing revolutionary organizations.

There should be two classes of membership; an outer circle of local and provincial groups

that knew nothing about the inner circle... The secret, hierarchical movement was to be

entirely manipulated by the London Central Committee...

Willich, Weydemeyer, and Weitling (for the second time ) had emigrated; other pioneering

social revolutionaries like Cabet and Harney soon followed; and Marx himself became a

writer for the New York Tribune. Militantly atheist "Communist Clubs" were formed among

German emigres in New York, Chicago, and Cincinnati during 1857-58. But for the most

part, the early dream of social revolution in Europe was simply grafted onto the national

dream of an expanding America, while in Europe many of Marx's German associates

became absorbed in the nationalist mystique of the German drive for unity; his old friend

Moses Hess became a visionary Jewish nationalist.

Marx, however, continued to believe in the inevitability of a social revolution global in scope

and permanent in nature. [...]

In arguing for a centralized revolutionary dictatorship in the name of a semimythologized,

monolithic proletariat, Marx had moved close to the positions of Blanqui. This evolution in

tum heightened the conflict which had already opened up among social revolutionaries

between Marx and the passionately anti-ideological, anticentralizing Pierre-Joseph

Proudhon. [...]

It was not so much a battle of ideas as a clash of the moralistic and the authoritarian

temperaments over the question, should revolutionaries have an ideology? Marx

answered Yes-and became the enshrined authority for the more than a billion people

who had come to live under communist rule by the mid-twentieth century. Proudhon's

negative answer made him the ancestor (often unacknowledged) of anarchistic

alternatives, which rarely succeeded but never quite disappeared.[...]

Proudhon feared the authoritarianism in Marx even when he himself was being offered a

major share of the authority: “Because we are at the head of a movement, let us not

make ourselves the chiefs of a new intolerance, let us not pose as the apostles of a new

religion, even if it should be the religion of logic and reason.” [...]

The ghost of Proudhon lived on to haunt Marx for at least the remainder of the nineteenth

century. Proudhonist opposition to centralism and ideological dogma dominated both the

First International and the Paris Commune of 1871 -the two most important phenomena

in the development of the social revolutionary tradition in the West during the remaining

years of Marx's life. [...]

... the insistence of the Proudhonists on a working-class movement based on trade

unions and cooperatives that would avoid becoming involved in political or ideological

questions. [...] (The relatively nonviolent Proudhonists were, in effect, supplanted within

the International by the more militant and revolutionary form of anarchism represented by

Bakunin) [...]

Marxism responded effectively to Proudhonism and its ideological allies only after forming

the first Marxist journal in France (Jules Guesde's Egalite of 1877), and the first Marxist

circle among the Slavs (Plekhanov's "Liberation of Labor" in 1882). [...]

In his (Proudhoni’s) view political conflicts tended necessarily to become wars. Since

conflict could not be eliminated from human life, the ending of war required the elimination

of politics. [...]

Religion was a final area of difference between Proudhon and Marx; they had radically

differing attitudes towards the Judaeo-Christian heritage. Marx was a confident

philosophical atheist. Though well versed in scripture as a youth, he showed almost no

interest in it as an adult. His hero was Prometheus, who took fire away from the gods; and

his perspective was patronizing if not contemptuous towards both his Jewish heritage and

the Christian tradition of Germany into which he had been baptized. Religion he viewed as

the opium of the people and the confusion of the intellectuals.

Proudhon, on the other hand , was deeply and permanently disturbed by Christian

teachings. He was not at all a believer in any conventional sense. But his writings were

saturated with religious symbols and scriptural passages. (...) He developed a special

revulsion for "neo-Christian" sentimentality-"those fools who admire Christianity because it

has produced bells and cathedrals" -and a lifelong hatred for "religion offering itself as a

safeguard to the middle class." (...) He became a passionate spokesman for the current in

French social thought that sought to separate Christ from the Church: to equate social

radicalism with true Christianity.(...) Proudhon did not seek any new religion, but rather the

final victory of Justice on earth, which he increasingly came to identify with the realization

of Christ's teachings. Christ to Proudhon was the starting point of Revolution and the

supreme teacher of Justice-and thus the man who validated both of Proudhon's key

concepts. He believed with Tolstoy that "only that revolution which is impossible to stop is

a fruitful revolution"; and that Christ had started it. [...]

The anti-ideological, quasiChristian, and anti-authoritarian populist ideology also shared

Proudhon's fear of the cities, of central government, and of the entire lexicon of liberal

constitutionalism. Like the Proudhonist socialists in late nineteenth-century France, the

Russian populists divided into a moderate "possibilist" wing (the "legal populists") and a

more violent "anarcho-syndicalist" wing 80 (the terrorists in the People's Will organization

and later in the Socialist Revolutionary party). [...]

"THE PRESS is a drum which leads to the frontier," wrote Armand Marrast, editor of the

newspaper National during the upheavals of 1848 in Paris. The frontiers were physical as

well as spiritual, for just as journalism moved men to revolution, so journalists often

manned the movements that resulted. [...]

But the link between journalism and the modern revolutionary tradition goes back much

further and may even validate the hypothesis that "every revolutionary change in the

means of communication is followed by a change in the entire structure of society." [...]

Hegel as a young theology student had directly substituted the reading of English

newspapers for morning prayers- a distant anticipation of the modern educated man

substituting the Sunday newspaper for Sunday church. [...]

The marriage of the printing press to telegraphy and a mass audience in the late

forties fascinated the restless and uprooted emigres like Marx. The very titles of

journals to which the German radicals contributed suggested the mobilization of words

to technology [...]

Louis Philippe's ministers saw a free press as the "universal dissolvant" [...]

In 1836, Paris revolutionized journalism by creating two newspapers that were sold at

half the previous price and were designed less to instruct than to divert (...) and ushered

modern mass journalism [...]

The new mass dailies moved "beyond ideology," substituting entertainment for politics,

creating literary heroes in the absence of real political ones. In the decade following 1836,

the readership of dailiesin Paris increased from 70,000 to 200,000. Journalism became a

substitute for both politics and education in a society where access to the assembly and to

the universities increased hardly at all during the same period . As one Frenchman noted in

1838: "In a country where there is more liberty than education, the press attempts to

determine (and not just repeat) what everyone thinks." He s aw the mass press building a

"new democracy" by providing a tribunal for the people that was "higher than the tribunal of

judges, the throne of kings, and, I shall say, even the altar of the living God." [...]

Pictures became a favorite weapon of the new radical journalism for the first time in

November 1830, when the lithographed cartoons of the Honore Daumier began to appear

in the new weekly La Caricature. The word caricature came from the Italian caricare: to load

a weapon, and there was more than a little explosive power in the new pictorial press. Men in

the mass could often be reached through pictures more easily than through words: through

the common denominator of emotion rather than the uncommon quality of reason.[...]

Visual symbols on coins and calendars, statues and posters provided both semaphore and

sacrament for the revolutionary faith. [...]

the creation of a world-wide news network led not to peace, but to a restless search for

fresh foreign adventure. The new telegraphic technology brought in excitement from

abroad even as it increased police control at home.[...]

Adolf Ludwig Fallen, argued that "newspapers are the wind by which the weather cocks

turn." He sought to stimulate a mass popular revolution in Germany by journalistic

propaganda that relied heavily on songs of heroism and sacrifice. [...]

This mobilization of the emotions through the press helped create an almost religious

conception of journalism within a new generation of German and Russian exiles. Made

desperate by the failure of 1848, they developed the new idea that a journalist was not

merely an "apostle," but a prophet and priest as well...: “I held on to my profession in

the manner of religion. Editing my daily article was the daily sacrament”. [...]

It might be said that true ideological journalism had in many ways begun with the

Young Hegelians of the early 1840s. [...]

In the 1840s, the life of the editorial and typographical staff of a radical journal became

a kind of model for the new society. Here truly was a sense of community, built around

a journal designed for ordinary men in contemporary language. [...]

In the 1840s, the life of the editorial and typographical staff of a radical journal became

a kind of model for the new society.[...]

...he (Corberon,) saw the production of a journal as a kind of Masonic initiation into a

new type of fraternity. [...]

...typographers began to form societies and organize banquets in the 1849-51 period,

echoing the slogan: "Toward the institution of a universal, typographical free-masonry!"

A supporting network of secret correspondents within Russia provided part of the

nucleus of future revolutionary movements. [...]

Surveillance began, and repression received new impetus, when Zaichnevsky

gathered together a student group known as "the Society of Communists" and formed

"the first free Russian Press" later in the year. Moving for safety from Moscow to Riazan,

this society-the first ritually to invoke the terms socialist and communist on Russian

soilbegan the long Russian tradition of revolutionary audacity... [...]

This remarkable call to revolutionary terrorism suggested that journalists might be

leaders of the "revolutionary party" in its struggle for power with the "imperial party."

Zaichnevsky rebuked Herzen for lapsing into reformism and liberalism, for failing to realize

that "it is time to begin beating on the alarm bell and summon the people to revolt, not to

mouth liberal slogans” [...]

...revolutionary journalism swamped in 1863 by the reactionary nationalism that swept

through Russia as a result of the uprising in Poland. It is to the waning of revolutionary

nationalism in most of the European world in the third quarter of the nineteenth century

and to the rise of the counter-revolutionary mass press... [...]

Social revolutionaries found secure ground in Europe only in London with the first

meeting of French and English workers' delegations in 1862 and the establishment of

the First International two years later. (...) ...but just before founding the First

International in 1864, Mazzini and his friends made one last attempt to revive the dream

of a European-wide alliance of nationalist revolutionaries (...) The major society through

which the new Italian revolutionaries recruited allies in London, Brussels, and Geneva

was called the Philadelphians. Like the earlier society of the same name, it was an

outgrowth of Masonry, which provided international connections and an outer shell of

secrecy for recruitment. Some prominent socialists like Louis Blanc drifted into the camp

of the national revolutionaries in London through the Masonic Lodge of United

Philadelphians. Most leaders of the International Association refused to sign the

association's official condemnation of the Mazzinian program in December 1858; and

many began collaborating with Mazzini even before the association collapsed in 1859 [...]

...his (Bakunin’s) joining at Garibaldi's suggestion of the new lodge, IL Progresso Social.

He wrote a lost Catechism of Free Masonry, and an organizational outline: Aims of the

Society and the Revolutionary Catechism. Bakunin also wrote blueprints for a series of

phantom international revolutionary brotherhoods: an International Secret Society for

the Emancipation of Humanity in 1864, an International Fraternity or International Alliance

of Social Democracy in 1868, and a final Socialist Revolutionary Alliance in 1872. Behind

it all was the vision of a lost natural society-with each cell a family and all members

brothers. Bakunin's focus on a social revolution that opposed any form of national authority.

In these last years he had become an authentic revolutionary anarchist. He organized the

first Italian organization explicitly to oppose the socialist to the nationalist ideal: the Alliance

of 1864, which directly challenged Mazzinian deference to familiar political and religious

modes of thought. (...) Although Bakunin linked revolution to anarchism in his final years,

his strategic perspective remained in some respects national. [...]

For a brief initial period, the First International included in its general council a substantial

number of Philadelphians and Italian nationalists. With their removal from the general

council in the autumn of 1865 and the concurrent collapse of Mazzini's efforts to establish a

new international of nationalist revolutionaries, a half century of romantic revolutionary

conspiracy came to an end. [...]

The ideological journalism of the revolutionary tradition came to suffer rivalry from two

different sources: (1) the prosaic, largely apolitical journals of workers themselves, and (2)

the chauvinist press with its dazzling sensationalism which transformed nationalism from a

revolutionary to a reactionary cause. [...]

Journalism produced by working people has almost always been nonideological, and only

rarely revolutionary. This type of journalism began in England and America, where working

class readers were from the beginning preoccupied with immediate issues and material

interests. [...]

The real weapon against workers from 1848 to 1914 was, however, the new patriotic press.

It hypnotized the masses everywhere –hitching the old romantic nationalism to the new

wagon of industrial state power. [...]

England led the way in the 1850s, with a patriotic press that first put pressure on a weak

Liberal government to intervene in the Crimean War of 1854-56... The Times introduced

telegraphic dispatches from special war correspondents and war photographers to make

this distant war seem more immediate and vivid than the more urgent domestic problems.

The Times encouraged its readers, moreover, to kibbitz on the management of the war;

and ended up depicting it as a kind of crusade for civilization... [...]

After victory he (William Russell, a brilliant Irish correspondent of The Times) became "a

sort of king without a crown."...and a new weekly began publication in November 1855

with the fiat statement that "this country is governed by The Times ." [...]

Bonaparte was Prometheus unbound, a parvenu in power; and the young revolutionary

was almost always both a restless Promethean and an outsider in search of power. [...]

The rational reintegration of society preached by Hegel and SaintSimon was

inconceivable without the strange combination that Napoleon introduced into the world:

a despot ruling in the name of liberation. However un-Napoleonic may have been the

final hopes that Saint-Simon placed in the working class and Hegel in the Prussian state,

the impulse to look for some universal secular transformation of society came as much

from the concrete fact of Napoleon as from the abstract rhetoric of the revolution. [...]

The Napoleonic legacy thus helped create the original revolutionary ideologies; and

the Napoleonic legend helped in more subtle ways to revive and intensify the

revolutionary impulse in the 1840s. [...]

Napoleon wrote in 1839 the influential Des Idees Napoleoniennes, which called for

a new supra-political authority avoiding all doctrine and seeking only concrete

benefits for the masses.

This influential work, which sold 500,000 copies in five years, reflected the ideas

of the Saint-Simonians... [...]

He adopted as his own the Proudhonist proposal for workers' associations and

benefits, and transformed the Saint-Simonianism of his youth into an

authoritarian industrialism and an anticlerical positivism that greatly strengthened

the French state. In this respect Bismarck was his imitator, transforming

Hegelianism, the ideological system hitherto prevalent among German

revolutionaries, into a new and conservative German nationalism. The roots of this

neoHegelianism lay in the tract of 1857 calling for the building of a monument to

Hegel, but warning that none would be adequate "until the German nation would

build its state into the living temple of purest realism." [...]

Napoleon bought off opposition newspapers... Napoleon was a master of cooptation

and public relations. He often offered prominent radical personalities jobs while

stealing their slogans... Napoleon simply adopted what his monitoring of public

opinion convinced him was expedient. [...]

Essentially, he seems to have prepared the way for the characteristic political formula

of the Third Republic : the combination of revolutionary rhetoric and practical reliance

on a permanent centralized administration left over from the first Napoleon. [...]

His (Rochefort’s) principal target was Napoleon, whom he assaulted with an

unprecedented barrage of animal metaphors... When forced to flee to Brussels,

Rochefort resumed publication of The Lantern with a model declaration of

Revolutionary independence from cooptation by Napoleon... Although Napoleon

succeeded in having the weekly shut later in 1869, Rochefort simply transferred his

energies to a daily, La Marseillaise...Rochefort and his associates "proposed to rally

the entire European socialist party to establish through the journal permanent relations

between all the groups ." Such plans were fanciful, but his format was widely imitated.[..]

Rochefort himself was eventually seduced by the new chauvinism [...]

A typical journalistic move from the revolutionary Left to the chauvinistic Right-the

motion so common in superpatriotic journalism was that made by the most politically

influential left-wing French journalist of the late nineteenth century: Georges Clemenceau.

His transformation into the ultra-militant leader of France in World War I illustrated how

mass politics had replaced not only the conservative statecraft of the restored European

monarchies after Waterloo but also the French-led tradition of revolutionary opposition.[..]

The decisive watershed year for many was 1871, which sealed the victory of

reactionary chauvinism over revolutionary nationalism. [...]

Germany and Italy-the foci of hopes throughout the early nineteenth century for an

extension of revolution beyond France-thus achieved final union in 1871 not through a

revolution of their peoples, but through the military and diplomatic power of their leading

sub-states: Prussia and Piedmont. [...]

The most dramatic and fateful event of the watershed year, 1871 was, however, the rise

and fall of the Paris Commune. It triggered the swing to the Right throughout Europe-and

opened up new horizons for the revolutionary Left. [...]

The Paris Commune of 1871 was the largest urban insurrection of the nineteenth century-

and precipitated the bloodiest repression. It was a watershed in revolutionary history: the

last of the Paris-based revolutions, bringing to an end the French domination of the

revolutionary tradition. [...]

The Paris uprising was the first example o f mass defiance of the new military-industrial

state in modern Europe. The Commune created however briefly-an alternative,

revolutionary approach to the organization of authority in modern society. Successful

subsequent revolutionaries in Europe followed the communard example of making

revolution only in the wake of war. [...]

Insofar as all later revolutionaries were to find unity among themselves, it was in the

singing of the great hymn that emerged from the martyrdom of I87I: the Internationale.[..]

..the Commune represents a crucial turning point from the previous dominance of

National political revolution to the coming emphasis on transnational social revolution.[...]

In the "bloody week" that followed the final entry of the Versailles troops into Paris on

May 21, 1871, some 20,000 communards were killed. Another 13,000 were subsequently

sent to prison or exile. Physical horror was accompanied by an attempt largely

unprecedented in prior repressions of revolutionary movements-to treat revolutionaries

as pathological criminals. [...]

..the conservative Third Republic rose on the grave of the Commune-and proved to be

the most enduring form of government in modern French history. (...) The Third

Republic enlisted the economic power of the industrial bourgeoisie and the military might

of the new centralized state. It wedded yesterday's revolutionary slogans (republican

government, secular education) to today's vested interests. [...]

The French Republic was as much a conservative, unitary state as Bismarck's empire;

and France soon followed Germany in transforming the revolutionary nationalism born

in the late eighteenth century into the reactionary imperialism of the late nineteenth. [...]

Both Marx and Bakunin had been radical Hegelians... Both developed almost

simultaneously an early, lifelong commitment to the coming revolution to end all social

inequality. Both were convinced internationalists who rejected any purely national

revolution. Both sought to base their struggle on oppressed social classes, rejecting

the elite conspiratorial traditions of the past. Neither participated in the Commune...[...]

In the 186os, when Marx was establishing a central authority among northern European

revolutionaries in London, Bakunin threw himself into a series of movements in southern

Europe that intensified his anti-authoritarianism and anticipated the anticentralism of the

Commune. [...]

By 1866, Bakunin had concluded that local, autonomous communes were the only

legitimate form of political authority. [...]

He set forth a plan for a European-wide revolutionary movement against state power in

all its forms... [...]

The originality of Bakunin's program lay in his call for a workerpeasant alliance. He

insisted that revolutions narrowly based in cities tended simply to seize the existing power

of the central state and then superimpose their authority on the countryside. Elitist, urban-

based revolutionaries like Marx tended to radiate intellectual contempt for the peasantry by

denigrating their religious faith and their individualistic methods... Bakunin: “There is no

point in extolling or denigrating the peasants. It is a question of establishing a program of

action which will overcome the individualism and conservatism of the peasants”. [...]

Such a program lay in unification for "the extirpation of the principle of authority in all its

possible manifestations." Without such a common objective, ordinary people in the cities

and the countryside might be distracted by demagogues into a meaningless civil war under

rival banners of political oppression-peasants rallying to monarchy, workers dying for a

republic. [...]

Marx's vision of the Commune as an instrument of political deliverance from imperial war

was likewise later transposed into Lenin's vision of the Soviets as a political mechanism for

establishing proletarian power during World War I. [...]

The common enemy of Blanqui and Marx in I848 had been Proudhon, and their shared foe

in 1871 was Proudhon's anarchistic heir, Bakunin. [...]

In the first half of 1872 , the conflict gave birth to a new vocabulary. In March, Marx revived

the word anarchist as a pejorative term (...) The Bakuninists replied by introducing in June-

for the first time in history-the term Marxist to characterize the new efforts to establish

authoritarian control over the International. [...]

Marx moved its General Council to New York to prevent Bakuninist control. But Bakunin's

Followers steadily extended their influence in Europe-taking the allegiance of many local

membership bodies out from under the limited central authority that Marx had established.[..]

The conflict between Marx and Bakunin in the early 1870s further atomized an already

decimated Left; and, in effect, destroyed the social revolutionary tradition in western Europe

for a generation. With Bakunin soon to die and Marx aging and somewhat isolated, the

international revolutionary tradition in the early seventies lost its active leadership as well as

its first international organization. [...]

The new concept which rationalized-if it did not help inspire-the turn to violence among both

these groups in the 1870s and the 1880s was the Bakuninist idea of "propaganda by the

deed." [...]

The romantic, heroic mentality died with the Paris Commune. Both revolutionary nationalism

and French leadership were undercut [...]

The conservatism of the Sacre Coeur combined with the industrialism of the Eiffel Tower to

produce a new kind of state power capable of annexing and transforming the forms of

romantic nationalism. (...) The musical melodrama that had accompanied and ennobled

revolutionary nationalism was replaced on the forefront of musical experiment by a new type

of opera that heralded the rise of the Germano-Russian stage of revolutionary development.[..]

Lenin-the man who eventually led the revolutionaries to power-would turn for guidance to

the period of the Commune. Indeed his first move as an exile in Switzerland on hearing

that urban fighting had broken out in Russia in 1905 would be to begin reading and translating

the military memoirs of a leader of the communards' military resistance: Gustave-Paul

Cluseret. (...) Cluseret modernized revolutionary violence. He infused revolutionary thinking

with the knowledge of modern, mass warfare... [...]

Cluseret's retrospective writings on the Commune advocated a new kind of total war... provided

blunt tactical suggestions for a fresh, unromantic approach to street fighting: attack by night,

neutralize fire power by concealment, occupy corner houses, and so forth.[...]

Lenin's revolutionary career fused the two major new forces that had arisen to dominate the

imagination of the Left after the defeat of the Paris Commune: German social democracy and

Russian populism. These movements grew out of the rival traditions of Marx on the one hand

and of Proudhon and Bakunin on the other. They reflected as well a new and more professional

attitude towards the problems of organization and violence respectively within the new industrial

state. [...]

Like everything else, music was put at the service of the state. Opera, yesterday's

medium of revolution, became today's handmaiden of reaction.[...]

Light music for the masses-like the new mass journalism-provided diversion for

reactionary imperialists rather than inspiration for revolutionary nationalists.[...]

..the Rhine was to become not just the artery of the fastest growing industrial complex

in the world, but also the mysterious source of a golden ring capable of bringing

mastery over the world and the downfall of the gods. [...]

The parallel emergence of the very different figures of Richard Wagner and Modest

Mussorgsky heralded a rejection of the romantic lyricism... Ideologically, their operas

expressed a new nationalism completely divorced from any revolutionary message. (...)

Wagner and Mussorgsky played important roles in the development of national

consciousness in each country. Indeed, their music provides a kind of prophetic foreboding

of the two most fateful revolutionary upheavals of twentieth-century Europe: the national

socialism of Hitler's Germany and the socialist nationalism of Stalin's Russia. [...]

... there is clearly a mobilization of subliminal emotions in Wagner's music. The young

Adolph Hitler was an avid Wagnerite... [...]

EUROPE after the Franco-Prussian War and the Paris Commune entered a new age of

social and political conservatism. But it was profoundly different from the royal restoration

at the beginning of the century. A new industrial order had created a new interdependence

through the railroad, the steamboat, and the telegraph. Individual countries had

transformed nationalism and republicanism from revolutionary slogans into forms of social

discipline. The new national state possessed the military and police power to suppress

revolutionaries; and the state was gaining the productive powers and political skills to

provide consoling social benefits to the masses.[...]

After two decades of intermittent warfare among European states, European leaders now

turned their militant energies outward for three decades of imperial expansion against the

non-European world. Imperialism proved to be a more effective rallying cry than revolution

with the European masses; [...]

The symbol and source of dynamism in the new industrial state was the machine... The

machine mobilized the masses for productivity, made them factors in its factories. It was

the magician of modernity, transforming raw material from within the earth into finished

power over it. The machine also became Moloch in motion, spreading the sovereignty of

steel throughout the world by steamboat and locomotive. [...]

The machine thus came to contain violence within itself. It was soon mass-produced by

other machines as the American system of interchangeable parts combined with German

skill in precise microscopic measurement. [...]

The subconscious model for revolutionary organization subtly changed from that of a

structure to that of a machine. [...]

Professional people, often with aristocratic backgrounds, who viewed themselves as

creative builders of an ideal order, now gave way increasingly to a new type of intellectual-

organizer preoccupied with shaping an effective organization for, if not from, the working

class. [...]

The machine itself was a model of organized violence; and revolutionaries were learning its

lessons as they turned to the problems of organization and to the possibilities of violence for

mobilizing the masses. [...]

The old centers of gravity-France, Italy, Poland-faded in importance, as the new type of

organization appeared in Germany and new uses of violence were developed in Russia.

Thus we return again to fire; it was the blast furnaces and fire-driven machines of the

Ruhr, the Saar, and Silesia that during the second half of the nineteenth century

transformed a localized, semirural German people into the most industrialized and

urbanized major nation in Europe. The fire-driven machinery which stood behind the

rapid industrialization of Germany was a product in effect of a "second industrial

revolution." Whereas the first Industrial Revolution a century earlier in England emerged

through the trial and error of artis an-craftsmen, the new German accomplishment

emerged rather from the laboratory of the scientist-engineer. [...]

Germany had supplanted both England and France as the most dynamic industrial

power in Europe. [...]

Social Democracy provided a new type of revolutionary leader. He did not attain power.

He remained in the wilderness-but as an organizer rather than a prophet. The German

party represented the point of transition in the history of revolutionary movements

between revolutionaries without power in the nineteenth century and power without

revolutionaries in the twentieth.

The "Communist party" about which Marx spoke in the 1840s had been more an object

of faith than a matter of fact, and he extolled it subsequently not for anything it did, but

for its spiritual essence as the first "party in the great historical sense." (...) Despite

Marx's efforts to control and discipline it, this amorphous body never became a "party"

in this or any other sense. [...]

Social Democratic was probably the most important political expression of Marxism

during Marx's lifetime-even if it was largely unconnected with the International and not

yet sufficiently disciplined ideologically to be a "party" in Marx's "great historical sense."

its name expressed its aim of social rather than national revolution and its identity as

something more than liberalism and less than communism.

Revolutionaries have repeatedly sought to give new vitality to an old label by attaching

fresh adjectives to the word democracy. The first youthful communists in the early 1840s

described themselves as "true" and "fraternal" democrats . Aging Stalinists a century

later attempted to refurbish the tarnished communist cause by referring to "people's"

democracy, democracy "of a new type” (...) Social democracy... was gradually linked

with Marxism. [...]

The moderate reformist impulse was strengthened throughout the labour movement by

the formation in 1902-03 of an International Secretariat of National Trade Union Centers.

(...) This growing movement swamped the weak Marxist Social Democratic Federation

in England, which had briefly sought to provide revolutionary leadership for the labour

unrest of the late 1880s. British unions were enticed by incrementalism, and unlike their

German counterparts were creators (not creations) of a political party. [...]

Optimism within the working class about evolutionary social progress was paralleled by

growing socialist conviction among upper-class intellectuals. The Fabian Society

founded in 1883 played a catalytic role, preaching the "inevitability of gradualness" in the

movement towards a socialist society. Taking their name from the Roman warrior Fabius,

who learned to wait patiently before striking a fatal blow against Hannibal, the Fabians

were less doctrinaire in their reliance on the masses than the Social Democrats. They

feared that "the revolt of the empty stomach ends at the baker's shop." They rejected not

just revolutionary tactics, but also the concept of class struggle: “the conflict between

bourgeois and proletarian might produce industrial unrest; it would not produce socialism.”

Fabian ideas deeply influenced Eduard Bernstein, the leading German Social Democratic

exile in London in the 1890s. Through him, the nonideological reformism of late Victorian

England was transformed into the Marxist heresy of revisionism. German Social

Democracy became less democratic in the process of rejecting Bernstein and, perhaps

more suitable thereby for later adoption in authoritarian lands further east. [...]

He argued that a capitalist collapse was not inevitable, and a catastrophic revolution

increasingly improbable. Wealth was in some ways being spread under the capitalist

system, and class distinctions blurred. [...]

He returned to Germany in 1901... Bernstein had brought to Germany the view widely

expounded throughout the European Left that capitalist society might "grow into socialism

without a violent revolution." Yet the argument seemed more appropriate to England than

to Germany... Finally...was the long attachment of Social Democrats to the consoling myth

of a coming revolution which had sustained them during the long period of the antisocialist

laws. They could not bring themselves to abandon the idea in theory even if they did in

practice. Thus, revisionism was stamped out as a threat to the revolutionary faith. [...]

Kautsky..guarded the faith intact and kept the believers united with his interpretation of the

Koran of Social Democracy, Capital. But unlike Mohammed, he was not to be "the seal of the

prophets." For it was in Russia, not Germany that revolution first broke out in 1905, and that

social revolutionaries eventually came to power in 1917. [...]

Part of the explanation for the (German) Social Democratic "failure" lies in the nature of the

movement itself. As we have seen, it conceived of power in an altogether different way from

the revolutionary movements of an earlier era, the difference described earlier as the shift

from a Masonic to a machine model of revolutionary organization.

The Masonic models...had conceived of power in architectural terms as the enclosure of

space by a structure: locating legitimacy within an inner lodge or circle; revalidating politics

through the structure of a constituted assembly rather than the body of an anointed monarch;

liberating others by enclosure within a grande nation; ultimately seeking to "make the world a

pantheon."

But the new German state...had simply coopted for conservative ends these images of the

national revolutionary era. The "springtime of nations" had given way to the long hot summer

of industrial unrest and imperial expansion. The new machine model of the German Social

Democrats expressed the replacement of national by social revolutionary ideals.

The Germans drew from the machine the image of power as the dynamic development of

material force in time, rather than the progressive conquest of segments of space through

moral heroism...German Social Democracy, therefore, saw its avenue to power in a political

strategy that developed over time rather than in para-military efforts to "liberate" oppressed

areas. [...]

The success of the Social Democratic party as a political machine gave it a vested interest in

the very national state within which its power was increasing. Having lost the sense that earlier

revolutionaries had of a separate identity, a fraternal conspiracy anchored in its own sacred

space, the new mass organization was unable to preserve its distinctiveness from the established

political system.

The first major war of the twentieth century, the Russo-Japanese conflict of 1904-05,

led directly to revolution in Russia in 1905. And when violent war came again in 1914,

(...) Lenin foresaw the flame of a coming revolution when others saw only the smoke

of war (...) he built on a unique-and uniquely violent-Russian revolutionary tradition [...]

How and why did Russia move from the conservative somnolence of the late years of

Nicholas I in the early 1850s to the revolutionary turbulence that greeted Nicholas II forty

years later? How was revolutionary socialism able to prevail in a land hitherto renowned

for reactionary nationalism? [...]

The tradition stands-like Russia itself-as the bridge between Europe and Asia. The

Russian revolutionaries of the late nineteenth century represented both a reprise on the

Europeans of the early nineteenth century and an anticipation of the extra-European

revolutionaries of the twentieth. The proper monument to the Russian revolutionary

tradition should not be one of those healthy, heroic workers celebrated in Stalinist

sculpture, but rather some simple, sickly student with the two heads of Janus: one looking

back to European inspiration, the other forward to a global transformation. [...]

If the machine symbolized the German revolutionary movement, the bomb symbolized the

Russian. [...]

The Russian fascin ation with explosives dates back to the early Muscovite tsars, but was

intensified by the western economic expansion of the late nineteenth century. [...]

The supreme revolutionary organization of the era, the People's Will, ended the reign of

Alexander II with a rain of bombs... November 1879-after the first bomb had exploded in a

first attempt to assassinate Alexander II (...) In its final plans for the successful

assassination of the tsar on March 1, 1881, the People's Will attached special importance

to the bomb even while recognizing that shooting might be cheaper and surer: “It would not

have created such an impression. It would have been seen as an ordinary murder, and

thus would not have expressed a new stage in the revolutionary movement.” [...]

The new Russian tradition which emerged in the 1860s can be analyzed in terms of five

evocative words central to it: nihilism, intelligentsia, populism, terrorism, and anarchism.

Each word had been used before elsewhere, but acquired through Russian usage both a

new meaning and a new world-wide currency. Taken together the five terms suggest

uncompromising, total opposition to the status quo.

The sense of being a unique generation usually feeds not only on exaggerated expectations

of reform, but also on identification with a political leader who seems to represent a

charismatic agent of change. (...) the Russian students in the late 1850s developed their

own more democratic groupings which met to define and defend student rights (...) Much of

the subsequent behavior of radical Russian students followed the earlier pattern of German

students during the revolutions of 1848-49: the printing of journals, the founding of "free

academies," the attempts to recruit army support (...) The term nihilist had been popularized

in Karl Gutzkow's tale of 1853, Die Nihilisten, to characterize the materialism of the German

students in the disillusioned aftermath of 1848. [...]

Fanatical, ascetic belief in science was the key. Scientism was for Chernyshevsky and his

younger friend, Dobroliubov, largely a case of the "exchange of catechisms" by former

seminarians replacing one absolute belief with another "without any internal struggle."

generalized fears were specifically attached to the new student revolutionaries when the

pamphlet Young Russia appeared in May 1862, precisely at the time of the major fire.

This document was the work of two Moscow students, Peter Zaichnevsky and Pericles

Argiropulo, and it marked the beginning of a Russian revolutionary tradition demonstrably

different from anything in the West. (...) manifesto grew out of the new, scientistic nihilism.

(...) A split soon developed with Argiropulo, who argued that "to preach does not mean to

fight." Zaichnevsky contended in effect that preaching must-if it was serious-escalate into

confrontation and even conflict... “...everything is false, everything is stupid, from religion...

to the family....a revolution, a bloody and pitiless revolution....must change everything down

to the very roots....we know that rivers of blood will flow and that perhaps even innocent

victims will perish...” [...]

Public confrontation with deceptive officials and timid reformers would help strip away

the respectability of official Russia, just as the rhythmic student chant of chelovek-cherviak

(man is a worm) was breaking up any remaining aura of sanctity about obligatory theology

lectures. [...]

About ten Moscow students , mostly from the Volga region, had in the course of 1864

formed a secret revolutionary group called simply The Organization; and within it there

emerged an even smaller and more secret group known as Hell, which purported to be

linked with a European Revolutionary Committee. (...) Members made vows of celibacy,

secrecy, and complete separation from all family and friends from the past. The goal was

the assassination of the tsar-preferably on Easter Sunday. [...]

Nechaev, the dark genius of the Russian tradition. Unlike almost all other revolutionaries

of the 1860s, Nechaev came from a working-class family. [...]

A Romanian student leader in Moscow, Zemfiry Ralli, had pioneered the professionalization

of revolutionary organization by trying to model a secret society directly on Buonarroti's

Conspiracy. Ralli then went abroad to become Bakunin's principal editor; and Nechaev

soon followed him to Geneva, gaining accreditation from Bakunin's mythical "World

Revolutionary Union." While abroad, Nechaev drew up and published his famed Catechism

of a Revolutionary. (...) This was not the first Revolutionary Catechism; and was in many

respects a continuation of Bakunin's efforts to adopt Masonic rituals for a revolutionary

manual. [...]

...the word intelligentsia was introduced into the Russian language in 1861 in an article

describing south Russian students in the Hapsburg Empire. It soon became the "verbal

talisman" of the new Russian student generation as a whole-laden...[...]

Shelgunov, the first radical to popularize the term, had envisaged in his Proclamation to the

Young Generation of I86I a relatively apolitical, new elite, "the intelligentsia of the country,"

emerging from the enlarged student population. Within a decade, Shelgunov had introduced

the word intelligent. (...) Pisarev and Mikhailovsky saw the intelligentsia as "the moving force

of history," and history itself moving in accordance with progressive laws set down by Saint-

Simon's protege, Auguste Comte Bakunin and Lavrov, the two principal theorists and leaders

of the revolutionary emigrant community, were moved more by the Hegelian brand of

ideology-evident in Lavrov's appeal for the "critically thinking personality" to become "a

conscious, knowing agent of progress." (...) In order to sustain the radical traditions of

the earlier sixties during the repressive atmosphere that followed the assassination

attempt of 1866 one needed the reassurance of history. Thus, the nihilist became the

intelligent. He had moved from iconoclasm to ideology. [...]

Though the first body of people to conceive of themselves as an intelligentsia viewed

themselves as evolutionary friends of science... the convergence that soon developed

between the intelligentsia and the revolutionary cause was already foreseen by Peter

Tkachev (...) Tkachev and Nechaev...affected a kind of coup d'imagination with their

ascetic version of Blanqui's idea that an amoral elite must both make the revolution and

rule after it.

Populism was never a fixed doctrine but rather a vague social ideal common to many

agrarian societies undergoing rapid but uneven modernization. The two major movements

to call themselves populist in the late nineteenth century occurred on the rural periphery of

European civilization: in Russia and America. Common to both (and to later populist

movements) was a thirst for social regeneration that idealized the older agrarian-based

human relationships yet ironically prepared the way for the further consolidation of

centralized economic and political power.

Populism became a mode-and not just a mood-of thought when an educated elite defended

the ways of a backward region or economic sector confronted by the advance of capitalism

and a market economy. It was cultivated by those whose education had alienated them from

native roots and values yet who sought symbolic and psychic compensation in the idea that

"the people" would produce "some sort of integrated society" that would avoid the

depersonalized elitism of capitalism.

Russia’s intellectual elite suddenly discovered the narod (nation, people), making the

Russian peasant the repository of all their hopes and personal needs for a more humane

social order. [...]

The new, nonviolent populism began with a second wave of student unrest in I868-69 (...)

Populism was an essentially Proudhonist-type movement that was antidoctrinaire and

egalitarian with a passion for older communal institutions, decentralized federal structures,

and mutual aid societies that dealt directly with pressing social needs and bypassed the

political arena altogether.(...) (Plekhanov, who in the following decade was to found the first

Russian Marxist organization) [...]

The terrorist turn was inspired by the increased activity of extremist groups in south Russia, particularly

in Odessa and Kiev. Odessa was under military administration, and revolutionary leaders there drew on

sectarian religious ideas as well as on a quasi-criminal subculture to spawn new forms of extremism...

Right-Left confusion was evidenced again by the movement that developed in Chigirin near Kiev involving

nearly one thousand peasants in a fantastic secret society allegedly led by the tsar himself to liberate the

peasants from the nobility... Terrorism began to dominate the Russian revolutionary movement in the fall

of 1877 largely because of two Ukrainian members of Land and Liberty... [...] People's Will organization

was formally constituted in the summer of I879 to fight autocracy "with the means of William Tell," using a

highly centralized para-military organization... The structure represented an almost complete return to the

Buonarrotian tradition of secret, hierarchical conspiracy... Beyond two lower levels of "agents" stood the

third, inner group, the famed "executive committee" which used the designation "agent third degree"... [...]

The People's Will generally called itself an "organization" till early 1880, and thereafter a "party."From the

beginning it rejected the possibility of functioning as an open organization, and insisted that members could

be brought in only by cooptation after a period of apprenticeship as a "candidate." [...] While presses

remained important to the People's Will, its distinctive new institution was the terrorist cell located near a

railroad depot, police station, or official residence. Women were included, giving the cell the external

appearance of a peaceful family group. But in some windowless inner room or deep-burrowed tunnel the

real business of the "struggle group" took place: the assembly and deployment of bombs. [...]

The ascetic terrorist s acrificing himself for a new era of freedom and science remained a model for Russian

students [...] Contrary to popular belief, terrorism did not come from the Reign of Terror in the original

French Revolution . To be sure, the Committee of Public Safety formally endorsed "terror as the order of the

day," and tolerated a Draconian program particularly in endangered border areas such as Alsace under

Saint-Just and Eulogius Schneider. But the committee viewed these as extraordinary, wartime measures and

anathematized terrorisme... Marx briefly embraced "revolutionary terrorism" as a slogan and an expedient

after the seeming defeat of other revolutionary methods late in I848. He s aw it developing in response to

"the cannibalism of the counter-revolution," and revealed the dark secret of its appeal. Terrorism was the

ultimate method of revolutionary simplification, the antidote to both complexity and confusion..: “to shorten, to

simplify, to concentrate the murderous death throes of the old society and the bloody birth pangs of the new”[..]

The terrorist tradition... left behind to Russia was both anarchistic and authoritarian. It was