Max Nomad's Permanent Revolution
AVRICH, PAUL
Max Nomad's Permanent Revolution POLITICAL HERETICS By Max Nomad Michigan. 367 pp. $5.95. Reviewed by PAUL AVRICH Department of History, Queens College; contributor, "Political Science...
...The chief beneficiary of almost every design for a new social order is not the common man, says Nomad, but a new privileged aristocracy: Plato's philosopher-kings and warriors have their modern counterparts in the technical intelligentsia and military officers of totalitarian societies...
...One readily follows, for example, the transmission of revolutionary doctrines from Gerrard Winstanley to William Godwin to Kropotkin, or from anarchism to syndicalism to anarcho-syndicalism...
...The most famous visions of a better world, from Plato's republic to Marx's dictatorship of the proletariat, square admirably with the deepest aspirations of déclassé intellectuals...
...Nomad began his journey through the realm of ideas, he was optimistic about man's capacity for building a just society...
...The manual laborer would thus be enslaved anew by a ruling minority whose "capital" was education instead of money...
...and to supplement the sections on Marx, Bakunin and Lenin, one can turn to the author's Apostles of Revolution for fuller portraits...
...The tantalized reader of his brief summary of Machajski's views will want to look up Nomad's ampler treatment in his Aspects of Revolt...
...As he travels the broad streams of socialism, communism, anarchism and syndicalism...
...Is it any wonder, then, that the leading revolutionary practitioners of modern times have grappled these doctrines to their souls with hoops of steel...
...Nomad thus believes in a permanent revolution: not in Trotsky's sense of the continuous expansion of Communism, but in the ceaseless struggle against all privilege, tyranny and exploitation—whether by free entrepreneurs or by the state— a struggle for personal and cultural freedom and for a decent material life...
...The others —including Eugene Debs, Errico Malatesta, and Kropotkin himself— were humanitarians, martyrs or romantic dreamers whose ideas were alien to a world in which power is an inescapable fact of life...
...The masters of Saint-Simon's new society were industrialists, bankers and engineers...
...After the Russian Revolutions of March and November 1917 brought a new elite to power, libertarian opponents of the Soviet regime called for a "third revolution" to remove the Bolshevik dictators...
...and there is no new thing under the sun...
...Lenin, similarly, was convinced that revolutionary consciousness could be brought to the working class only "from without"—that is, by the radical intelligentsia, of which Lenin was a member...
...Must we conclude, then, in answer to Prince Kropotkin's question, that there are no stainless heroes in history...
...Decades before Milovan Djilas lamented the formation of a "new class" of party leaders, industrial managers and army officers, such European sociologists as Gaetano Mosca, Robert Michels and Vilfredo Pareto were forecasting the rise of a new oligarchy of organization men...
...In this book, Max Nomad cuts straight to the nerve centers of political movements...
...Bakunin...
...Besides, who knows what effect authority would have had even on these men, if ever they had been in a position to use it...
...In their manifesto of 1796, the members of Gracchus Babeufs Society of Equals, dismayed by the rise to power of a new ruling clique, called the French Revolution "only the forerunner of another revolution, still greater, still more solemn, and which will be the last...
...In Fourier's phalanx, the lion's share of the produce was awarded to a minority of capitalists and technicians...
...Nomad tells us that there have indeed been a number of genuine rebels against privilege and exploitation...
...Nomad ably describes their principal features, observing with special care the places where they come together and flow apart...
...Few heretical dreamers, according to Nomad, aimed at achieving a truly egalitarian society...
...And even Machajski, despite his egalitarian theories and his criticisms of elite rule, advocated a "world conspiracy and dictatorship of the proletariat," a notion not far removed from the preachings of Lenin or of Auguste Blanqui...
...In a socialist society, private capitalists would merely be replaced by a new privileged class of politicians, administrators and technical employes...
...Throwing the rascals out is a progressive act even if new rascals take the place of the old...
...and that which is done is that which shall be done...
...In his latest book, Max Nomad traverses the whole realm of radical thought and action, searching, like Diogenes, for such virtuous men...
...But those among them who managed to seize hold of the government were intoxicated by the strong wines of power...
...If his subsequent encounters with "circulating elites" have led to disillusionment, the author has yielded to skepticism but not to pessimism or conservatism...
...contributor, "Political Science Quarterly," "Russian Review" "Where are those," asked Peter Kropotkin in his memoirs, who will come to serve the masses—not to utilize them for their own ambitions...
...who outwardly preached a revolt of the masses to destroy all privilege and authority, inwardly believed in the necessity of a "temporary" dictatorship by himself and his disciples...
...If the journey uncovers but few unsullied servants of the people, it comprises, nevertheless, a remarkable short history of those who dreamed of changing the world and those who actively tried to change it...
...The Utopias of More and Campanella were "aristocracies of knowledge," ruled by priests and savants...
...At the same time, he succeeds in laying bare the synapses linking together diverse ideas and men...
...it is the only just course of action, bringing inspiration and often genuine improvement, to the "havenots" and "know-nots...
...When, as a youth...
...And at the turn of the century, Nomad's erstwhile mentor, a Polish radical named Waclaw Machajski, warned that the followers of Karl Marx were not genuine champions of the cause of the workers., The Socialists, Machajski declared, were not manual workers, but intellectuals who hoped to ride to power on the shoulders of the proletariat...
...For the abolition of private property, Nomad points out, does not result in a classless society if inequalities of income and education remain...
...That the two greatest revolutions of modern history merely installed new exploiting minorities upon the throne may lead one to conclude with Ecclesiastes that "the thing that hath been, it is that which shall be...
...Whatever wisdom Nomad may perceive in these phrases, he still believes that the history of human progress can be written in terms of revolts against the status quo...
...As for Marx, by stressing property rather than income as the criterion of class membership, he either wittingly or unwittingly concealed the possibility that a new middle class of "mental workers" would arise to exploit the proletariat and peasantry...
...Yet Nomad's desire to present a history of political heresy in such compact form occasionally results in a sketch that requires fuller delineation...
Vol. 46 • June 1963 • No. 12
