The leaders were selected and promoted among them, the workers and peasants by origin were encouraged.
They were not interested or forgot the data about the estate origin of the SRs Combat Organization personnel or the personnel of the Central Committee. The party believed that the proletariat is the crown of creation when it was just a pretext for the seizure of power by the best – the misfits, psychos, outcasts. To what this has lead is common knowledge: a total nobody came from the country – the little son of a kolkhoz director, the dumbhead Misha Gorbatchev and then the Sverldlov dumbhead – Boris Yeltsin, and the State created by the genius of madmen, sadists, poets, butchers, the extraordinary State collapsed. That’s what a wrong personnel policy means.
One should have tracked in workshops of bohemia, in prisons, in asylums – strange individuals – that’s what should have been done. Possessed, composing poetry, talking in sleep on unknown languages. One should have taken in the 70s in the Central Committee Vladimir Bukovski, Natan Sharansky, Eduard Kuznetsov and Volodia Gershuni! (I knew the grandson of the terrorist in 1968-70. We even lived for some time under the same roof. Half of Volodka’s life was spent in prisons and asylums. Regardless of the ideological divergences I respected him. With Savinkov we are tied through Kharkov, place of his birth and I spent there my childhood and early youth.) But to take such delinquent, but vigorous people those who would have taken them in the CK should have been geniuses themselves! It is a paradox but to save a rapidly aging elite and State could only those who attacked it the most furiously…
Looking at our NBP regional organizations we can see with great satisfaction that they are headed by provincial journalists, poets, rockers, punks, half-educated students. There are also a few workers, they are great guys, but they are temporary, accidental workers (and have already become professional revolutionaries) but they are the black sheep of their class and as an exception just confirm the general rule. That is why NBP is not involved with the masses, does not try to make zombies out of the working people (we cannot equal the TV-empires’ ability to propagandize and besot the people). However, NBP conducts a selective propaganda, recognizing and organizing the active minority – the misfits. In the 60s-70s the European leftists also turned to the proletariat – they stayed near the factories entrances flooding the workers with propaganda leaflets but after looking on themselves in the mirror, after comparing themselves with the proletarians and after reflecting on who they were they put forward the theory that the most revolutionary class are students. We, the NBP, though among the members of the party a part are students, we don’t think that the students is a special revolutionary class. To this day the pupils of senior classes of schools beat them and leave them far behind by revolutionism. But even this is not a truth in last instance. The revolutionary classes do not exist at all. A revolutionary character is either is or is not. So the most revolutionary type of individual is the misfit: a strange, unorganized person living on society’s margin, a talented pervert, fanatic, psychopath, unlucky fellow. One should not think that there are too few of those for a revolutionary party. There are hundreds of thousands of marginal persons if not millions. This is a whole social group. A part of misfits fills the ranks of the criminal word. The best have to be with us.
Lecture 9
Here are some theses about the working class:
1. The proletariat (excluding the top qualified workers) is rather a temporary category. The largest part of the proletariat is composed by a quickly qualified or lightly qualified proletariat. That is, such work specializations that are learned only from a week to a month – is mostly the learning of security technique. A significant part of the proletariat is composed by young people before and after the army (that is at the crossroads of life, when their fate is not yet decided), who had spent time in prisons, unsettled failures and those who naturally are less bright than the others. Those who nevertheless have the strength to put themselves together in life, to finish studies or by some other mean to rise a bit higher on the social scale, to discipline themselves – inevitably leave the factory or the plant.
2. The highly qualified worker in his essence an atypical proletariat because he suffers exploitation in the most insignificant level. He sells his labor relatively expensively. In what is he worse than a designer or a programmer?
3. The mentality of the proletarians, their psychology, worldview, individual behavior are completely cut off from their professional activity. They are workers only during their contact with the machines. During the epoch of banal, general, equal information propagated by television, the workers have an all-Russian mentality, characteristic of under-educated classes of society. This is a mentality and worldview of a petty bourgeois, its soviet kind – the commoner, consumer of TV-dreams. Television is today more important than everything, more important than the State – it is the class leveler. Television dictates an equal worldview for all, finally realizing the tendency of the lowest society classes remarked already in the last century by the French writer Gustave Flaubert to “reach the level of stupidity already reached by the bourgeoisie”. They’ve reached it.
4. The proletariat, like the other poorest and under-educated population classes is subject to the illnesses of the weak: alcoholism, apathy, lack of initiative, surplus weight, lack of a spiritual goal in life, untidiness, I-don’t-give-a-fuck psychology: in short he considers himself a life victim. And he is a victim.
5. A part of workers has some kind of a haughty desperation of people who have nothing to lose. A similar psychology can be observed in prisons among a part of cons – like, we are anyway inveterate people. These kinds of proletarians can be counted among the best ones because a defiant inveteration is still a form of pride.
6. According to professor Prigarin (leader of one of the small, competing with the KPRF “communist” groups) in Russia there are from 17 to 19 million of those, who could be called proletariat, in other words, hired workers, who have jobs in factories and plants for a whole week or partly. Prigarin mentioned this data on the congress of the left opposition in 1998, his statistics was detailed, with curious numbers and facts. Alas, not having in the Lefortovo castle the access to statistics I will just note that apparently Prigarin had in mind that in Russia there is from 17 to 19 million industrial workers. This is still an awful lot.
7. The working traditions of soviet times (that were laughed at already in soviet times) practically did not survive. Only sad memories about those times when the “class-leader”, even if it wasn’t a leader, but at least served as a large Potemkin village, behind which hided the true masters of life – the party apparatchiks. The workers of the beginning of the XXI century don’t feel the pride to be the proletariat, hired workers. They feel embarrassed. Some pride is left in the workers of defense factories. (They are also the ones who are in the best position.) The paralysis of revolutionism is seen from the Severodvinsk businesses of sub-marines construction and repair (“Sevmash and “Little Star” – there we have one of the oldest NBP organizations) to the frozen factories of Volgograd. The integrated pulp-and-paper mill in the town Sovetsky (near Viborg) in the Leningrad region and the machinebuilding plant in the city of Yasnogorsk, Tula region, where the workers did well, at first glance are examples of revolutionism. Alas, the revolutionism on the CBK [pulp-paper-cardboard plant] was stimulated by the participants in the fight for the possession of the business. As for the attempt of self-government on the Yasnogorsk machinebuilding plant it ended up by a banal bribing of the workers. That has been a year and a half now that the workers movement does not show any signs of revolutionism anymore.