The Makhnovshchina
Is the solution to impending digital serfdom Anarcho-individualism?
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Nestor Makno was an uneducated peasant born in the Ukraine and imprisoned for almost ten years on terrorism charges as an active, and violent, anarchist-revolutionary; he was then released, like all political prisoners, when the Bolsheviks took power in October 1917. During the Russian Revolution it was his Fate to be raised up into becoming the leader of the dominant political and military force in South East Ukraine, before mistakes and betrayals extinguished most of the anarchist movement he led and cast him down to an existence of subsistence in a poor area of Paris where he died and was buried in obscurity, alongside the much more celebrated artistic and political figures lying in the Pere La Chaise cemetery.
Makno may have given his name to a revolutionary organisation, but it was not his, despite his pre-eminent influence at some crucial junctures, to command. It was a people’s social revolution that aimed to change completely the political and economic relations of Ukrainian society; it was an uprising of incredible vivacity that grew astonishingly quickly from the soil of the ‘uneducated’ and generationally mistreated peasants, the vast majority of the population at that time, living on the land they had worked for centuries. Obviously, the folklore of peasant-heroes such as Pugachev, public political discussion and activism had seeded the ground over the previous decades, before the rains of revolution watered them and they germinated with alacrity.
The political and military organisation, democratic with agreed upon delegation of powers and individuals working equally for a greater purpose, aside, which itself stood in contrast to the centralism of Bolshevism and the concomitant ambitious malignity of people who suddenly found themselves in the centre of history and whose best response to world-changing events was to focus on their narrow self-interest, by trying to climb the party ladder, instead of building that better world their slogans promised for the People. The new social organisation of the newly unbound peasantry was the communal soviet. Previously, for the most part, the peasantry had a little homestead of their own and worked the land of the landlord. The Anarchist Revolution in Ukraine allowed the peasantry to claim and divide among the soviets the property of the big landowners, and they farmed it along democratic, community-minded lines.
However, although held as a community, the land was theirs. Unlike the forced collectivisation imposed by the Bolsheviks, where people were coerced under threat of violence into state owned land and compelled to work for the state, depriving the peasants of the satisfaction of individual ownership or of a fraternal community control. The other politico-military forces in the country: the Whites and the nationalists, threatened the return of the oligarchs and the wealthy propertied class or, under duress and with many failures on the battlefield due to a lack of popular support, grudgingly gave the undertaking of ‘allowing’ the peasantry to keep the land which they now possessed. (In a country where land reform had been attempted many times, continually stifled by obnoxious, self-idealising Tsars and the supporting gentry, it’s not a revelation that the tillers of the soil did not enlist or support the Whites or nationalists in huge numbers as their armies fought the Bolsheviks.)
What was powerful was the alignment of self-interest and the Mir’s (the world of the peasant) interests, represented by the soviet, with the exhilaration of freedom. It called forth an explosion of energy that had peasants putting on stage productions, setting-up intelligence networks, theorising together, self-educating and, of course, fighting with great determination and courage, destroying many units of highly-trained professional, better provisioned and more numerous men.
Yet, unique as it was, the Makhnovshchina, sadly, tragically, notwithstanding its idealism, the voluntary nature of its recruiting, its willingness to make a compact with the Bolsheviks to protect the Revolution, honourably abiding by it until Bolshevik treachery undid the covenant, on more than one occasion, and its forbearance in not engaging in the dark arts of cynical manoeuvring and allowing the Whites to destroy Trotsky’s Red Army while at the same time exhausting themselves, leaving only the Makhnovists as the military masters of the Ukraine and possibly southern Russia, failed. Perhaps if it had compelled those under its governance to fight for their lands and their rights or acted more mischievously then it might not have been decimated as a movement, still, if it had done so, the inflaming principles of the crusade for social justice would have been dampened and possibly a mirror image of the Leninist state would have been reflected in the Ukraine without any requirement for conquest by Red power.
There is coinciding warning and hope given by the unfolding of the Makhnovshchina and its ultimate falling away. In many ways, we are in a pre-revolutionary environment, just as the Russian Empire and it’s surrounding states were from 1905 onwards - a prolonged period of crisis. Yet, our more sophisticated and technocratic elite have realised this and also that to try to forestall this future is futile. What is required is to dominate it. In order to achieve this, they are trying to have a revolution from above, as stealthily as possible, while they lock down the commanding heights of the economy and its technological development, using the adumbrated collapse as an opportunity to be master of the consequences, thereby directing and accelerating the process to its, they hope, end point of bio-tech neo-feudalism, stability and control.
For those who want a free future for humanity, it is up to us to develop some form of anarcho-individualism, I think. The awareness of ‘imaginary rules’, as Walt Whitman calls them, has to be absorbed by tens of millions of people and, without the knee-bending impetus to conform to the axioms of by now thoroughly discredited institutions, an act the provides security and order for the majority, we must fall back on our own individualism and energies, on an understanding that our own capacities will be the key to our future. Since it is exactly those rules of air and ink that oppress us, that do not align with our deeply held values, that must now be contemptuously disregarded, in place of which, we turn to our own individuality and that of like-minded people to rely upon, then why should we wait until there is a revolution or a greater awareness of the situation amongst the majority before acting? We can do it now - as far as is practical, at least, and keep on pushing such a model, attracting others as we do so.
When the Revolution in Russia came, like the French Revolution, it came too quickly and veered between the bifurcated poles of idealism, symbolised by the Makhnoschina, the Greens and the Kronstadt sailors’ rebellion, doomed to defeat, and cynicism, represented by the Bolsheviks, their careerists and the Tsarist officers who changed uniforms and ruthlessly suppressed all liberty to preserve their status. The generational subjection in Russia to a rigid, highly-stratified social order incubated a rage that burst forth in all directions, killing rich and poor alike, eventually without reason or greater purpose, making the reaction and flight to Order both brutal and inevitable. Why can we not be prescient about this?
Currently, in our society, there is the clash of two revolutions, the one from above attempting to pre-empt the other one, the one from below. The better we in the freedom movement can attune ourselves to a world of freedom and self-reliance before the clash of social forces becomes intensified to a yet greater extent, the easier it will be provide support to each other and, who knows, perhaps to reinvigorate and make fit some aspects of the institutions we have that are potentially worth saving.
