Palę Paryz (I Burn Paris) by Bruno Jasieński (1929)
[Note: all the sections from 'Palę Paryz' were translated by loosavor. Two things that should be borne in mind: 1. the translations are still in the draft stage and 2. Jasieński is not easy to translate! But Soren Gauger might be having a go... ]
Palę Paryż online
Jasieński related pictures are taken from here
1. I Infect Paris
2. Plague One: Pierre’s Revenge
3. Plague Two: The Transmission of Internationalism
4. From The Paris Commune to I Burn Paris
5. The Failure of Proletarian Internationalism
6. Conclusion
Notes
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1. I Infect Paris
In 1929, Palę Paryż (I Burn Paris) got Bruno Jasieński deported from France. Entitled I Burn Paris solely in response to Paul Morand’s light-hearted satire of the Soviet Union, I Burn Moscow, a more appropriate title for Jasieński’s novel would have been I Infect Paris. Unlike Parisian society, the buildings of Paris actually escape the novel unscathed: the book incensed the French Republic because it invoked plague upon their decadent capital.
The initial bacterial plague is utterly indifferent with regard to its victims, wiping out capitalists and communists alike. But Jasieński’s book was far from indifferent: the lethal concoction of bacterial epidemic and the ideological plagues it triggers wipes out pro-American, pro-British, bourgeois Paris and creates fertile ground for the establishment of a pro-Soviet, Internationalist commune in its stead.
I Burn Paris furnishes an example of how a book can swiftly and dramatically alter the course of its author’s life. The novel was a text-machine via which Jasieński wrote himself (or via which Jasieński was written) out of obscurity and penury in Paris and into international fame and rapturous praise. Once written and unleashed, I Burn Paris began injecting its input into the script of Jasieński’s life, cutting him from one country and pasting him into another. Shortly after his deportation from France, Jasieński was invited to the Soviet Union, where he was feted and lionized, and where he spent the rest of his life till his execution at the hands of the NKVD.
Jasieński left France as an unwelcome visitor from the Second Polish Republic, but he did not leave as a Polish citizen, at least not on his terms. I Burn Paris marks a critical threshold in Jasieński’s line of flight away from classification imposed from without – you are Polish, you are a Jew, you are a Polish Jew – into his self-determination, which had begun with his conscious definition of Polish Futurism and then evolved into his identification with the International Proletariat. I Burn Paris is about burning bridges, about revolt against ‘your own’ nationality and ‘race’; a revolt which bourgeois nations and orthodoxy have a tendency to classify as treason and apostasy.
This traitorous element of Jasieński’s Communist Internationalism must have worried the French Republic as much as his visions of plague-stricken Paris. I Burn Paris cashes out as an undisguised incitement to revolt. This would also have contributed to his not being welcome back in Piłsudski’s Poland after his deportation from France. [1]
Jasieński’s allegiance to Internationalism may also have had a hand in sealing his eventual fate, as Proletarian Internationalism was the component of Marxist theory that Trotsky stuck to his guns over in opposition to Stalin’s thesis of Socialism in One Country. As Aleksander Wat notes, Stalin purged the Polish Communist Party (KPP) in the thirties because of its Trotskyite leanings in the twenties. [2] Jasieński’s infamous enthusiasm for Internationalism in 1929, the same year Trotsky was expelled from the Soviet Union, meant that Jasieński was tarred with the Trotskyite brush and was eventually destined for an NKVD cell, despite the fact he had been imported with open arms and no matter how hard he toed the Stalinist Party line.
In this wider context, I Burn Paris can be seen as Internationalism’s last, utopian gasp before the horrors of the thirties, and should be more cherished by those of a Trotskyite Communist persuasion, wherever they are.
Jasieński’s novel is also important for those interested in the concept of meme plagues. In the last section of the book, after the successful containment of bacterial plague, Jasieński explicitly invokes International Communism as a positive plague unleashed via the airwaves to wipe out bourgeois nationalism and the warmongering, decadence and injustice that, in Jasieński’s view, go with it.
The conjunction of biological plague spread by a deliberate act of vengeance and ideological plague spread by radio transmitters constitutes the futurist component of I Burn Paris. By 1929 Jasieński’s futurism, officially abandoned as revolutionary experimentation with form and language, had evolved into a revolutionary way of looking at things. I Burn Paris is both a prediction and invocation of a possible future and a futuristic view of the time it was written in.
The novel identifies the fragility of social order in the late twenties and the potential of contagious ideas to break all ties to the past and bring about huge social upheaval. As a conscious carrier of the most utopian strain of the communist plague, Jasieński attempted to engineer its spread via his book. I Burn Paris is a textual version of the test tubes Pierre swipes from the Bacteria Institute: both contain infectious agents. Ultimately, the utopian, literary strain of communism spread by Jasieński and other intellectuals proved to be too weak:it was easily swamped and wiped out by the far more virulent, lethal and brutal strain engineered by Stalin.
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2. Plague One: Pierre’s Revenge
Yersinia Pestis - Bubonic Plague
The opening pages of I Burn Paris:
It all began from a petty state of affairs which, at the time, seemed both utterly insignificant and decidedly private.
On a beautiful November evening, on the corner of Rue Vivienne and Boulevard Montmartre, Jeanette announced to Pierre that she was in desperate need of a pair of evening shoes.
They ambled along, arm in arm, immersed in that random, clumsy crowd of extras that is projected every evening onto the screen of Parisian boulevards by the broken projector of Europe.
Pierre was glum and silent.
He had more than enough reason to be.
That morning the foremen had brought his gutta-percha-stepped patrol of the shopfloor to a sudden halt before Pierre’s machine and, fixing his gaze somewhere in the space above Pierre’s shoulder, had told him to pack up his tools.
This silent hunting had been going on for two weeks. Pierre heard from his workmates that, due to the lousy state of the economy, people had stopped buying cars. Factories were facing the threat of closure. The workforce was being cut by half everywhere. In order to avoid trouble, people were being fired at various times of the day, from different sections of the factory.
After taking their place in the workshop in the morning, nobody could be certain that it would not be their turn that day.
Like dogs sniffing a trail, four hundred pairs of nervous eyes stealthily tracked the foreman’s lumbering steps as he made his way slowly, deliberating, around the workshops, and the furtive eyes strove to avoid meeting his slippery gaze, should it fall upon them. The four hundred people bent over machines as if they sought to shrink and merge with the greyness, in an effort to become imperceptible. Fingers raced each other in hot pursuit on machines heated from hurry, through whose hoarse cry the weeping fingers whined “I’m the fastest! Not me please! Not me!”
And day after day the vacillating script of steps would come to a hateful full-stop at one point on the shopfloor and the strained silence would be broken by the reverberations of a lifeless, impassive voice: “Gather your tools!”
Then, like a gust from a fan, a few hundred chests heaved a sigh of relief: “So it’s not me! Not me!” And, second by second, link by link, the hurried, well-trained fingers grasped, fastened and wound the eight-hour iron chain.
Pierre had heard that the first in line were those suspected of political activism. He had no reason to fear. He kept well clear of agitators. He didn’t take part in meetings. During the last strike he had been among those who ignored the action and carried on working. The tub-thumping workers had glowered at him. Before meeting with the foremen he always tried to squeeze out a friendly smile.
And despite all this, whenever the foreman began his silent, sinister strolls around the shopfloor, Pierre’s fingers fumbled under pressure, tools flew from his hands, he did not dare pick them up for fear of drawing attention to himself, and beads of sweat formed a cold compress on his overheated brow.
So, when the ominous steps suddenly stopped in front of his machine this morning, when he read the verdict on the foreman’s lips, Pierre unexpectedly felt a kind of relief: well at least it’s over now.
Indifferently and without a trace of hurry, he packed away his carefully sorted tools into a bundle. Without looking at anyone, he began taking off his workers’ overalls and wrapped them carefully in paper.(Part 1, Chapter 1)
Pierre has no history and no family. Unlike other characters in I Burn Paris, such as the Chinese communist P’an Tsiang-kuei, whose biography is given in meticulous detail, we know next to nothing about Pierre. He is defined by two basic facts: he is an unemployed machine operator who cannot afford to buy his girlfriend a pair of evening shoes.
He is a person stripped down to his bare economic potential; a potential which, under the rule of bourgeois capitalism, amounts to his essence. His economic situation consumes and wrecks his ‘private life’. He views his co-workers as competitors. Pierre is not so much a character as a product of economic relations. In fact, Pierre finds himself in exactly the situation outlined by Marx and Engels in The Communist Manifesto:
The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his “natural superiors”, and has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous “cash payment”. It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervor, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom — Free Trade. In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation...
... The bourgeoisie has torn away from the family its sentimental veil, and has reduced the family relation to a mere money relation.
Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind. (CM1: Bourgeois & Proletarians)
a page of the Manifesto in Marx's handwriting
Pierre’s relationship with Jeanette is pitilessly exposed as form of soft prostitution. He cannot keep her unless he supplies her with money in the form of goods deemed necessary for her lifestyle. Pierre’s urgent need to sell his labor is produced by his desire for Jeanette. As he roams the streets of Paris in an endless, fruitless search for work, as he sleeps rough, starves and is reduced to animalistic fighting over scraps of food in bins, his psyche is taken over by hunger and longing. When Jeanette attaches herself to a fatnecked capitalist his desire is transformed into a simmering desire for revenge. That relationships are essentially prostitutional in this decadent Paris is underscored when Pierre seeks shelter and warmth in a brothel. He is woken from his dozing by one of Jeanette’s friends who has become quite accustomed to her commodification.
“I’m sure you want to know how I ended up here? Oh God, it’s so easy. I never had any luck. Not once has a loaded guy come my way. For twenty Francs a month it’s a bit difficult to feed and clothe yourself. Completely different if you have a good friend like Jeanette has. I did my leg in. I got a health certificate. I was thrown out of the storehouse the next day. I had to try my luck on the street, and it’s not as easy as it seems. In the summer it’s not so bad, but when it starts raining... My health wasn’t up to it. I got sick... I was in hospital. When I recovered I ended up here. When it comes down to it, the work’s much easier. It’s always warm. I earn less, but it’s regular. Ten francs from the client, seven go to the house. They give us food. We can make ends meet. Sometimes you earn more, sometimes less, it depends on your luck. The day before yesterday for example I had fifteen clients – that’s forty-five francs. You never can tell though, it’s not like that every day. The work’s pretty tiring, but then every third day is free. You’re off already are you? You won’t stay a bit longer? I wanted to ask, what Jeanette’s up to. Aren’t you together any more? (Part I, Chapter III)
In Jasieński’s depiction of Paris, prostitution is the default setting for proletarian women. Proletarian men have no choice but to compete with bourgeois men. The competition is animalistic: the proletarian male is forced to prostitute his labor to keep a female safe from the predatory economic power of the bourgeois male: in short, the proletariat has no choice but to engage in soft prostitution (selling labor) to stave off hard prostitution (selling sex).
Once again, Marx and Engels had already described the economic setting in which Jasieński’s characters move:
On what foundation is the present family, the bourgeois family, based? On capital, on private gain. In its completely developed form, this family exists only among the bourgeoisie. But this state of things finds its complement in the practical absence of the family among the proletarians, and in public prostitution. (CM II, Proletarians & Communists)
Pierre’s first revolt against this state of affairs is to give Jeanette’s fat capitalist pig sponsor a good proletarian pasting the streets of Montmartre. Which lands him in prison.
Pierre seems to draw a certain amount of comfort from the free board and lodging provided by prison, and from its regularity and routines. Prison is “a miniature world governed by its own singular rules, on the margins of the vast, complicated mechanism of the world.” However, this comfort is disturbed by some new arrivals: workers who were arrested after troops opened fire on a demonstration.
Thrown into a common cell, the prisoners demanded to be relocated to a section for political prisoners. The prison authorities refused. The prisoners responded with a hunger strike.
Each day, huddled in his corner like a defensive hedgehog, greedily wolfing down his soup with bread, Pierre felt fifteen pairs of grim, steely eyes dilated by the atropine of hunger upon him, and under their gaze the tasty mouthful of prison bread, whose yeast was swollen with saliva, formed an unpalatable ball which stuck in his throat, and the thick soup went cold, developing a layer of skin in the mess tin.
From afar, as if from behind a glass wall, nighttime conversations would reach his ears. Words, carved like blocks, rose and climbed one on top of the other, and after a while a lofty edifice had grown towards heaven. All they had to do was go outside, roll up their sleeves and they could raise the edifice with real stone, perfectly, just as large and sturdy.
The world, like a badly constructed machine, destroyed more than it created. It could not go on like this. It all had to be stripped down to the nuts and bolts, discard anything unnecessary, dismantle and reassemble anew, once and for all. The plans are ready, the fitters are itching to go, it’s just the old, rusty iron won’t allow it. It took root and now the tissue is interwoven with rusty stitches – every thread needs to be torn out with our teeth.
And in the dark, smoky cell, on a shimmering tape of film, the myth of a new land in a reconstructed world unfolded.
Many a time in the factory had Pierre heard the long, monotonous tale of this new world where the rich and poor had ceased to exist, where factories would be the property of the workers, and where work, instead of slavery would become the hymn of a hygienic, liberated body. He was not a believer. The monstrous machine could not be budged. It grew from deep within the earth. Once set in motion it had been running since time immemorial. Grab the cogs with bare hands? They wouldn’t stop, just chop the hands off. He saw blood on blackened bandages, hands tied with bloody rags and thought: yet another effort in vain. A lacerated body thrown to the periphery, over the wall, with one flick of the transmission belt.
Sometimes, at night, from the groups bent together in conference, words white hot with hatred would burst forth; like sparks they fell on the soft sawdust of sleep, and dreams would belch with red flame: Go! Stand shoulder to shoulder with them! Storm! Wreck! Take vengeance!
Pierre sprang up and sat on the bed. Though the cool, lucid words of those in dark blue shirts rose symmetrically like bricks, they were not angry, not full of destructive hate, but rather of the resolute will of construction: pickaxe and trowel.
No, these people did not know how to hate! In place of one machine they had gathered a stack of plans for others, they would replace one with another and start the wheels rolling again, cogs catching cogs, pulling, dragging and lifting defenseless shreds of people, and again a multitude of Pierres maddened with fear will bloody their hands in the black spokes of wheels, unable to stop them or pause even for a moment.
And Pierre’s outstretched hand shrank back, retreated into the depths, he buried his head in the pillow and covered it with his arm, and after a while, on the pallet of compressed straw no longer lay a man, but a tortoise in an impenetrable shell of loneliness. (Part 1, Chapter 5)
Having refused the outstretched hand of worker solidarity and the potentials of class consciousness, Pierre has nowhere to channel his unwanted labor and is left with nothing but an implacable, lurking desire for vengeance.
Pierre suddenly felt how some subterranean current, walled up deep somewhere with the tightly joined bricks of the last few days, was rising and undermining from below, felt how the loosened bricks were breaking away, how the plaster cracked and fell away, and how a warm red stream flooded the floors laboriously constructed from the matter of everyday life, one by one, and slowly filled his eyes. He winced with pain and closed his eyes.
When he opened them again he saw only a blur of countless hotels, a swarm swollen with blood, fatnecks and thousands of women’s profiles, identical prints, all one and the same, such memorable faces.
From every doorway hundreds of Jeanettes came in and out, each one cuddled up to an apoplectic fancy man, each Jeanette deceptively similar to the others, Jeanette in an enchanted street of mirrors, in a living wood full of fattened, swollen necks.
Pierre shook from head to toe and choked back his exploding hate. In a moment, like a reflection from long ago, the neck of the fat man, leaking folds of blubber, loomed outside the hotel on Montmartre and disappeared, slipped through the fingers of Pierre’s clenched fists without leaving the expected satisfaction.
No! Not enough! What would one amount to? A thousand! A million! All of them! The city! Where to find those giant hands, those kilometer-long fingers that would seize in one grasp these wheezing, fat-enfolded throats? The lot of them! Crush them! Bring them down! Get drunk on their powerless wheezing! Hands! Where to find those hands?
All of a sudden and unexpected bolt of clarity illuminated his brain like a blinding flame of magnesium, so that he stood dazed and dumbfounded. For a moment he stood as if inspired, then he returned to himself and started to head back the way he came, straight ahead, through the crowds, like Jesus walking on water, giant and majestic, as if he held before him the beaming monstrance of his hate. He felt that people made way for him, opening up before him an avenue towards infinity. (Part 1, Chapter VIII)
Like the bacterial plague he releases into the water supply, Pierre’s vengeance is indiscriminate in its annihilation: he is quite prepared to wipe out his own class to get his hands on the cause of his frustration and despair.
The seemingly private matter of not being able to buy a pair of shoes for Jeanette is in fact far from private. The causes of this petty situation are rooted in the economic relations hidden beneath the surface of everyday life. The ramifications extend far beyond Pierre and Jeanette’s burst love bubble. Jasieński projects Paris of the twenties as such a volatile chemical-political mix that a shortage of fifty francs at a certain time and place triggers a chain reaction resulting in the death of almost the entire population. Pierre’s contribution to this reaction is his anti-social, self-obsessed character which is manifested in his failure to see himself as member of an international social class.
Proletarians of the World Unite!
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3. Plague Two: The Transmission of Internationalism
Each to his own
The bacterial plague unleashed by Pierre during the Bastille Day celebrations decimates crowds of Parisians and American tourists dancing to jazz music, the genre which the Soviet Union had condemned as being a symbol of capitalist decadence. At first the revelers try not to pay too much attention to those dropping like flies and writhing in acute intestinal pain in their midst, but eventually the wailing ambulance sirens begin to drown out the evil syncopation and make dancing impossible...
The government of the French Republic being on holiday in the provinces at this time, it is decided to put up a military cordon around Paris, and anyone attempting to leave or enter the city is to be shot. In short, the government hopes to contain the plague by leaving the inhabitants to die.
Whilst waiting to die in a power vacuum, the inhabitants spontaneously coalesce under the banners of nationality, class, race and creed. An array of micro-fascist republics and communes spring up. They stake out their territory, expel those who are deemed not to belong, and try to deal with the onslaught of plague as best they see fit. The Chinese Autonomous Republic, a severe and austere communist formation, ruthlessly kills any comrade with even the slightest plague symptoms and devotes its energies to finding a cure; the Jewish community embarks on a spate of vicious ethnic cleansing and attempts various hygienic measures before deciding to bribe American businessmen in an attempt to escape the city; the White Russian émigrés seize their chance to take revenge on the Bolsheviks in the Soviet Embassy; the English and American businessmen die in luxury hotels, whilst carefully guarding their huge stockpiles of food; the French proletariat try to smuggle food into the city before deciding to attack the Anglos-Saxon quarter in ravenous desperation. Try as they might to isolate themselves from carriers belonging to other social groupings, these separatist communes are all ultimately doomed because of the promiscuous virulence of the plague and the fact there are no fresh supplies of food.
Though it is abundantly clear where Jasieński’s sympathies lie, all of his carefully constructed protagonists either succumb to plague or meet other horrid ends. It is also worth noting that whilst the American capitalist, David Lingslay, is granted an honorable death, and the White Russian cavalry captain, Solomin, is given a chance to become reconciled with his Bolshevik brother and die alongside him, the two groups to which Jasieński himself could have ‘belonged’ to, i.e. the Poles and the Jews, display no redeeming qualities whatsoever.
The Poles in Paris are described as ‘impoverished’. They are also the only community to resist the Jews’ ethnic cleansing of the Saint-Paul district:
Reacting in accordance with their innate anti-Semitism, the Polish people put up armed resistance. There were bloody skirmishes with losses on both sides, until it ended in victory for the numerically superior Jews.
The Jews are presented firstly as absurdly superstitious, entrusting all their decisions regarding the plague to their Rabbi, who is supposedly in communion with God. When all the Rabbi’s ‘revealed’ measures fail, the heads of the community are presented as supremely self-seeking and unscrupulous: having no qualms about spreading the plague to the rest of the world, they bribe the American capitalists and arrange for a ship to transport the richest of them out of Paris at night, towards America.
“You are an idealist, Sir. (Mr. David smiled inwardly, with involuntary pride.) We rather thought that you were a practical man. You are condemning yourself to death, Sir, because you are afraid that a handful of Americans will become infected. Sir, you are not taking into consideration the fact that at the same time you will save a couple of hundred worthy Americans with capital who are imprisoned here in Paris, who we are prepared to take with us to America on our boat. Anyway, if you are such a humanitarian all of a sudden Sir, why do you not take pity on these three thousand Jews who will become infected and perish if they do not get out?”
“Why should I take pity on those three thousand Jews in particular, and not on the millions of other Parisians who are also condemned to death if they stay?”
“It’s not possible to take pity on everyone. It’s impossible to live like that. You have to take pity on those closest to you.” (Pt. 2, Ch.8)
From Shanghai to Paris, from Paris to Shanghai
Jasieński scorns the representatives of his ‘homeland’ and ‘race’ and heavily weights his text in favor of the Proletarian Internationalism represented by P’an Tsiang-kuei, the leader of the communist Chinese Republic in the Left Bank district of Paris.
P’an Tsiang-kuei’s primary function in the novel is to provide a wider context for the events in Paris. His path of enlightenment leads him from being an orphaned urchin in the streets of Shanghai with vague ideas of lazy white men who get others to do their work for them, to a class-conscious factory worker and activist who, having fully digested Marxism, perceives the international dimension of the struggle against imperialist oppression.
He swallowed the book whole. The difficult, unfamiliar economic terminology stuck in his throat like fish bones. He read it again. It seemed a whole lot easier and more comprehensible.
If the book was to be believed, oppression and poverty are not rife in China alone. In Europe the same tens of thousands of white people oppress and rob hundreds of millions of their own white workers and peasants. When it comes down to it, people are not joined by skin or the vertical cross-sections of national borders, but rather by the horizontal layering of class by virtue of which, despite differences in languages and customs, they share common interests and aims. The workers and the exploited from all over the world constitute one big family. Both the white and the yellow races suffer and fight for one thing. Just as the bourgeois the word over do. Not for nothing do the rich Chinese always walk hand-in-hand with the white invaders. (Pt 2, Ch II)
P’an Tsiang-kuei joins the Kuomintang because it promises to get rid of the foreign imperialists and because the party structure will improve his contact with the working masses. The party sends him to Paris to study and this enables Jasieński to plug his novel into contemporary events.
From afar, from the distant, glowing embers of Moscow, Lenin’s heated words flew across the world in red jets; like flickering cinders they fell ... The ground under foot shook from internal eruptions... The news from China was intermittent and unclear, it flew from the east like an alarmed flock of birds, tremulous harbingers of the coming storm.
And at last it happened. The white-hot cauldron burst under the hysterical screams of trembling parliaments and the pathetic lament of telegrams. From the cauldron poured forth molten larva, engulfing everything in its path; the accumulated, uncontrollable wave of the universal tide scattered innumerable yellow columns. The red sun of Kuomintang with its sickle, hammer and five-pointed star. The triumphal march north. Along telegraph wires, faster than artillery shells, flies the winged word: victory! (Pt 2, Ch II)
He returns to China and finds himself in the middle of the Kuomintang’s purge of its communists, which is blamed on the Koumintang’s right wing joining forces with the imperialists: the mass slaughter of communists and unionists was facilitated by the American and French armies and the English navy.
Communist Labor March, Shanghai 1927 [click to enlarge]
HMS Durban shore patrol, 'after the scrap' with communist agitators
Street Fighting In Shanghai, 1927 [click to enlarge]
[The caption reads:
As photographs from China naturally take some time to reach this country, those above illustrate occurrences there several weeks ago. The British Government’s policy in regard to subsequent events was outlined by Sir Austen Chamberlain on May 9, in the House of Commons. “Not two months ago,” he said, “it seemed as if the Southern Party and the Nationalist armies would sweep China from south to north. Nanking has already checked this victorious career, if it has not wrecked it altogether. It has split the Communist wing from the Kuomintang Party, and – most important of all – it has deeply discredited the communists and their foreign advisers in the eyes of all China. In view of this momentous development, the question of punishment for the Nanking outrages has assumed an entirely new aspect. The Hankow Government which was responsible for the outrages no longer controls Nanking. The real offenders – the Communist agitators – have been punished by the Chinese Nationalists themselves with a severity and effectiveness of which no foreign Power was capable. In Shanghai, Canton, and other towns, the extremist organisations have been broken up and their leaders executed... The questions of compensation and reparation are on a different footing... Whatever government emerges from the present confusion north and south of the Yangtze will be held responsible for the outrages on British subjects resulting from the civil war, and compensation and reparation will be demanded.” The Foreign Secretary also explained why it had been decided that reoccupation of the British Concession at Hankow was at present inexpedient, though fully justified.
The Illustrated London News, May 14 1927 (emphasis added)]
After narrowly escaping death, P’an Tsiang-kuei slips into the countryside to agitate there, hoping that the peasants will rise up. Though at a very low ebb, all is not lost.
One thought kept him going: in the north the immense Soviet Union was spreading, it had taken one sixth of the globe. It had survived intervention, blockades, years of famine and anarchy. Inside a ring of Imperialists, alone, with nothing but its own strength, it had put down roots and grown, level by level, upwards. Indisputable figures of statistics accuse, admonish and exhort: “Keep going! Don’t give in! Rise up! Disasters, oppression – that’s all just the beginning! In front of us lie victory, vastness. Don’t lose heart! (Pt 2, Ch II)
Then, somewhat unbelievably, he is sent to Europe as a secret agent whose task it is to unmask the counter-revolution among the Chinese émigré community.
For this fervent communist, the appearance of plague is extremely fortuitous:
He heard about the outbreak of plague for the first time from a little hotel boy. He was instinctively pleased: an unexpected ally. It will be better fun than any intervention. It will block up Europe for a good few months – no boats, no armies, no suitcases stuffed with pound notes. If only it would last for a while longer, until our side utterly crush the enemies at home and from abroad.
... An intriguing possibility - did Jasieński base P’an Tsiang-kuei on Deng Xiaoping? Deng Xiaoping spent his formative years in France and "transformed from a patriotic youth into a Marxist" while there....
Deng in Paris in the 1920s
Paris Calling
The twist at the end of I Burn Paris is that the residents of the prison have survived intact, having been isolated from infection. The survivors include the revolutionary proletarians that Pierre had shared a cell with. Pierre had dismissed their plans to start afresh as doomed to failure because the old machinery was too deeply rooted. But, ironically, Pierre’s plague has wiped the city’s slate clean: the bourgeois class has disappeared, along with its property laws. Once the proletarians have located the bourgeois food stockpiles – enough to keep them going for a while – and as long as they can kid the rest of the world that plague still rages in Paris, they can go about the business of constructing a self-sufficient commune in the middle of Paris ...
“I think I understand what Comrade Courreau is getting at. When I was checking the radio station on the Eiffel Tower, the same thought occurred to me: keep Europe convinced for as long as possible that the plague in Paris has not dies down. In the meantime, seize the city and set up a model commune. In the middle of France, in the heart of Europe, change the world’s metropolis into a huge communist city, a cell, a fire from where our system will radiate out across the entire continent. As soon as we are sufficiently organized, without waiting for our deception to be discovered, we will take the lead and send our appeal over the heads of the army which surrounds us to the workers and peasants of France and the whole world. We should not forget that behind the army blockade stand the mass of the French proletariat, and that the call which did not reach them from the East, deafened as they are by the whistle, the roar and the jazz-bands of capitalist orchestras, will, when sent out from here, set the whole of Europe shaking. Did I get you right Comrade Courreau?”
Comrade Courreau nodded his head...
... “In place of the plague, which was supposed to spread over the entire world, but which only cleared the ground for us to build on, we start the great plague of an idea, which will pour across the old continent like a sea of cleansing fire, laughing in the face of armies, cordons and borders. Paris, the first to show Europe the Commune will be the first to spread her system over the whole of Europe...” (Pt 3, Ch II & III)
However, while the proletarians grow wheat in the centre of Paris and turn the Luxemburg gardens into a vegetable patch, the bourgeois imperialists are up to their old warmongering tricks.
During the next two years, France makes a speedy recovery from the loss of Paris: American dollars, jazz and tourists flood into the new capital, Lyons. It’s business as usual for the bourgeois nations. They even have a new helper. A Polish envoy attends secret negotiations with the French and British. A week later, the European press is filled with stories of strange goings on in Poland.
In the territory of Poland, God knows from where, a new, hastily prepared Hetman appeared. He had come up with the idea of an attack on Ukraine with the aim of liberating her from the Bolshevik yoke. In a flurry of interviews he announced the revival of a ‘self-contained’ Ukraine joined to Poland in an historical union. With the silent consent of the Polish government, this freshly baked Hetman recruited the Ukrainian liberation army in Poland. The press sounded the reveille. There was a lot of talk about the permanence of historical boundaries. The government remained circumspect.
When it seemed that events had reached a critical threshold, the government of the Soviet Union issued a calm warning note to the Polish government, demanding, in the interests of European peace and good neighborly relations, the immediate disbanding of this belligerent organization which threatened the territorial integrity and peace of the Soviet Union.
The bourgeois press discerned an intolerable provocation in this note and started to hint at war. The affronted Polish government replied with a note not befitting diplomatic decorum. A heated exchange of ultimatums ensued. (Pt 3, Ch IV)
Poland is merely playing a part in the wider theatre of imperialist aggression. The Chablis-quaffing, oyster-gulping members of a club in Lyon know what’s really going on:
“My friend, a secretary for the Home Office, told me yesterday – of course this is just between us - that the government intends to order a mobilization tomorrow. A coalition of the entire cultured world is being formed, something like a crusade, against those communist bastards. Within three weeks the Bolsheviks will be swept out of Russia and the legitimate regime will be put back in its rightful place. In London, a temporary government made up from powerful Russian émigrés has already been put together, with the full knowledge of the English and French governments. They are even hinting, that reputedly...” – the gentleman with sideburns leaned over and finished his sentence with in a barely audible whisper.
“What are you saying!” – the bald man was intrigued. “Yes, that’s wise. Actually, I’ve been of the same opinion for a while. French industry will never rid itself of this ferment as long as the Soviets are around. Getting rid of the Soviets, putting Russia in order - that would be a decisive blow for our homegrown communism, a victory on our internal industrial front. For this, rational-thinking France will sacrifice anything.” (Part 2, Ch IV)
But things do not go in accordance with bourgeois plans. The homegrown communists side with the Soviet Union against ‘their’ national governments – the German proletariat refuse to let arms travel from Lyons to Poland, the French proletariat rejects the mobilization.
At this point I Burn Paris is not at all far-fetched. In 1920, during the Polish-Soviet War, or the War Against White Poland, as it was called by Soviet historians, the workers of Britain and France both resisted their governments’ half-hearted attempts to assist Poland:
In July 1920, Britain announced it would send huge quantities of World War One surplus military supplies to Poland, but a threatened general strike by the Trades Union Congress, who objected to British support of "White Poland", ensured that none of the weapons destined for Poland went any further than British ports.
The threatened general strike was for Lloyd George a convenient excuse for backing out of his commitments. On August 6, 1920, the British Labour Party published a pamphlet stating that British workers would never take part in the war as Poland's allies, and labour unions blocked supplies to the British expeditionary force assisting Russian Whites in Arkhangelsk. French Socialists, in their newspaper L'Humanité, declared: "Not a man, not a sou, not a shell for reactionary and capitalist Poland. Long live the Russian Revolution! Long live the Workmen's International!" Poland suffered setbacks due to sabotage and delays in deliveries of war supplies, when workers in Austria, Czechoslovakia and Germany refused to transit such materials to Poland. (from here)
And this is where, from the perspective of the Second Polish Republic, Jasieński is at his most traitorous. According to the nationalist narrative of Polish independence, in August 1920 at the Miracle of the Vistula, Poland had very nearly lost its newly-gained independence to the Bolshevik hordes. The Bolsheviks were painted as just another manifestation of the intrinsically expansionist Russian nation which had, with Prussia and Austria, carved up and occupied Poland for over 120 years. Yet just eight years later Jasieński was painting Poland as an aggressor and siding with its enemies.
"Fight the Bolshevik"
"To Arms! Save the Fatherland! Remember well our future fate."
Jasieński’s treacherous tendencies had been amply demonstrated during that war:
When the Red Army advanced on Poland, Bruno enlisted as a volunteer in the Polish army. He spent three years in the army, but it is hard to say he was very active in the defence of his homeland. He organized poetry evenings in the barracks during which he read works that… sang the praises of the invader. He was arrested for this (and was lucky that he was not shot for ideological subversion) and spent two years behind bars, which amounted to half his service in the army. [3]
From the perspective of proletarian internationalism, to fight for a bourgeois nation against the Red Army was to betray your own class. The Bolshevik narrative painted Poland as an ally of the Whites, as an expansionist, land-grabbing nation led by the landowning class. Most importantly, Poland could serve as a bridge via which the revolution in backward Russia could be exported to advanced Germany, which, in the view of the Bolshevik leadership, was ripe for revolution. The Red Army’s total defeat in 1920 on the outskirts of Warsaw meant that Poland actually turned out to be an obstacle stopping the spread of revolution, rather than a bridge.
"This is how the landowner's ideas end."
"One call is for both Ukrainians and Russians; don't let the Landowner be a master above a worker!"
by Vladimir Mayakovsky
The revolutionary commune in
I Burn Paris is what the Bolshevik leadership had always hoped for: a home-grown revolution in an industrially developed European country that would come to the aid of the Soviet Union and finally bring about the international conflagration prophesied in the Communist Manifesto.
In the spine-tingling conclusion of I Burn Paris, as the English fleet heads towards St. Petersburg and Poland prepares to invade the Soviet Union, the Paris Commune drops its cover and begins broadcasting its message to the world:
Paris calling! … Workers! Soldiers! Peasants! The revolutionary government of Paris is speaking to you. Paris, which you considered dead, lives. The rumours you have heard about the raging epidemic are untrue. The epidemic died out two years ago. The only ones saved were a few thousand Parisian proletariat who were thrown into prison during the May repression. On the ruins of old Paris, the proletariat saved thanks to their isolation in prison, has erected a new Paris during these years – a free workers’ commune… the imperial war, provoked by your bourgeois governments against the first worker-peasant state in the world, the Soviet Union… The workers of Paris calling! Workers! Peasants! Subjugated peoples! The war against the USSR is a war against you, it is a war against our commune, which you will defend as a bastion of international revolution in the sea of capitalist Europe. Everyone to arms! Everyone fight for revolutionary Paris!
With such a provocative, utterly uncompromising finale to his story, it is not hard to see why France deported Jasieński, why he was not welcome back in Poland, and why he was welcomed with open arms in the Soviet union.
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4. From The Paris Commune to I Burn Paris
The main inspiration for the pro-Soviet commune at the end of I Burn Paris was obviously the Paris Commune of 1871 - an event of momentous importance in the development of communism.
a) Marx on the Commune
Firstly, the Commune was made to validate The Communist Manifesto (1848). In The Civil War in France (1871), Marx seized upon the working class contributions to the Commune’s battle with the French state, and some of the distinctly socialist elements of the Commune’s administration, to squeeze and lop the events of 1871 so that they were in line with the prophecies and agenda of the Manifesto.
Some of Marx's key observations and conclusions:
1. The French state represented the interests of capital (= the bourgeoisie):
At the same pace at which the progress of modern industry developed, widened, intensified the class antagonism between capital and labor, the state power assumed more and more the character of the national power of capital over labor, of a public force organized for social enslavement, of an engine of class despotism. [ch5]
2. The Commune represented working class interests:
The Commune was to be a working, not a parliamentary body, executive and legislative at the same time.
Instead of continuing to be the agent of the Central Government, the police was at once stripped of its political attributes, and turned into the responsible, and at all times revocable, agent of the Commune. So were the officials of all other branches of the administration. From the members of the Commune downwards, the public service had to be done at workman's wage. [ch5]
3. The Commune attempted to abolish bourgeois property relations:
Yes, gentlemen, the Commune intended to abolish that class property which makes the labor of the many the wealth of the few. It aimed at the expropriation of the expropriators. It wanted to make individual property a truth by transforming the means of production, land, and capital, now chiefly the means of enslaving and exploiting labor, into mere instruments of free and associated labor. But this is communism, "impossible" communism! [ch5]
4. The Commune was an international, proletarian organisation which opposed national states:
If the Commune was thus the true representative of all the healthy elements of French society, and therefore the truly national government, it was, at the same time, as a working men's government, as the bold champion of the emancipation of labor, emphatically international. Within sight of that Prussian army, that had annexed to Germany two French provinces, the Commune annexed to France the working people all over the world. [ch5]
5. National War is a smokescreen and delaying tactic to hide the real war:
That, after the most tremendous war of modern times, the conquering and the conquered hosts should fraternize for the common massacre of the proletariat - this unparalleled event does indicate, not, as Bismarck thinks, the final repression of a new society up heaving, but the crumbling into dust of bourgeois society. The highest heroic effort of which old society is still capable is national war; and this is now proved to be a mere governmental humbug, intended to defer the struggle of classes, and to be thrown aside as soon as that class struggle bursts out into civil war. [ch6]
6. National governments (i.e. the Bourgeoisie) are at war with the International Proletariat:
Class rule is no longer able to disguise itself in a national uniform; the national governments are one as against the proletariat!
After Whit-Sunday, 1871, there can be neither peace nor truce possible between the working men of France and the appropriators of their produce. The iron hand of a mercenary soldiery may keep for a time both classes tied down in common oppression. But the battle must break out again and again in ever-growing dimensions, and there can be no doubt as to who will be the victor in the end - the appropriating few, or the immense working majority. And the French working class is only the advanced guard of the modern proletariat. [ch6]
b) Fitting Facts to Theory
Marx’s reading of the Commune conveniently fits the events into the narrow confines of his theory. For example, his claim that the Commune was ‘emphatically International’ is founded on a garbled interpretation of the facts.
On the one hand, the foreigners who aided the French state are cast as cosmopolitan predators:
The Second Empire had been the jubilee of cosmopolitan blackleggism, the rakes of all countries rushing in at its call for a share in its orgies and in the plunder of the French people. Even at this moment, the right hand of Thiers is Ganessco, the foul Wallachian, and his left hand is Markovsky, the Russian spy.
While on the other hand, the foreigners who aided and gave their lives for the good guys somehow give the Commune an Internationalist flavour:
The Commune admitted all foreigners to the honor of dying for an immortal cause... The Commune made a German working man [Leo Frankel] its Minister of Labor. Thiers, the bourgeoisie, the Second Empire, had continually deluded Poland by loud professions of sympathy, while in reality betraying her to, and doing the dirty work of, Russia. The Commune honored the heroic sons of Poland [J. Dabrowski and W. Wróblewski] by placing them at the head of the defenders of Paris.
It might be more accurate to view the Commune as having been emphatically patriotic, or even emphatically territorial, rather than ‘emphatically Internationalist’. The Commune sprang from a defiantly patriotic populace’s resentment at the Prussians being allowed “a brief ceremonial occupation of the city.” The city rose against the national government because that government was seen as betraying the city and failing to protect its inhabitants and their property:
Before the Germans entered Paris, National Guards, helped by ordinary working people, managed to take large numbers of cannon (which they regarded as their own property, as they had been partly paid for by public subscription) away from the Germans' path and store them in "safe" districts. [from here]
Illustrations from The Paris Commune of 1871 by Eugene Schulkind
Also, as dialectical materialism required Marx to cast the Commune as a straightforward conflict between the good working class and the despicably evil bourgeoisie, it meant he had to downplay or ignore any bourgeois involvement in the Commune. These days Marxist accounts of the Commune refer only to the workers, the Paris workers, the workers of Paris...
Anarchists argue that the Commune was driven by the petty bourgeoisie, rather than the proletariat:
The idea that the Paris Commune constituted a "dictatorship of the proletariat" can be easily refuted by examining its' class content. Most of the French working class in 1871 were not proletarians in the traditional Marxist sense (factory workers) but were artisans or semi-artisans - what Marx called petit bourgeoisie and most of his followers call petty bourgeoisie. Only five of the people on the Commune's council were proletarian in the orthodox Marxist sense; 35 were artisans. Thus, if the Paris Commune was the dictatorship of anyone it was the dictatorship of the petit bourgeoisie.
The Paris Commune was really a radical Republican rebellion, not a socialist one. "Commune" in France at the time just meant an administrative area, like "county" in the United States. Most of the people elected to the council were Jacobins. The socialists, mostly anarcho-mutualists and Blanquists, were a minority. The government implemented many reforms but did not seek to completely overthrow capitalism. It remitted all payments of rent for dwelling houses from October 1870 until April but did not abolish rent. It allowed workers to take over factories which had been closed down by their employers, to get the economy restarted, but only ones closed down by their employers. It made many other reforms but was ultimately just a reformist Republican government. They did not abolish capitalism, nor did the majority have any intention of doing so.
Both Marx and Lenin detested the anarchic, anti-authoritarian element of the bourgeoisie; the artisans who felt perfectly at home in the self-organizing flows of capitalism. From an anarchist's, or anti-authoritarian, libertarian point of view, communism appropriated the Commune, tamed it and locked it up in the cage of Marxist theory.
A less partisan, more complex account of the events of 1871 would probably view the Commune as being more a fight for democratic self-government, in which the values of bourgeois liberalism were allied (even if temporarily) with the values of working class socialism against conservatism and authoritarianism (in the form of Bonapartist absolutism). But Marx’s thought, being a prime example of the discontinuous mind which carves the world up into rigid classes, had no room for the possibility that in Paris 1871 sections of the bourgeoisie shared interests and aims with the working class.
c) Divisive Interpretations
After the fact, the Paris Commune became the subject of obsessive interpretation and fierce debate, and the divisions that arose were to have far-reaching consequences.
One school of thought (typified by the Mensheviks) explained the Commune’s failure along (what it claimed to be) orthodox Marxist lines: the Commune’s attempt to establish a revolutionary government was premature because it bypassed the stage of bourgeois revolution, which was deemed essential by Marx’s doctrine of dialectical materialism.
The other school (exemplified by Lenin and the Bolsheviks) focused on and drew inspiration from the Commune’s successes: the Commune had not made the mistake of merely reforming the existing bourgeois state and its apparatus, but had set up its own, different state and implemented direct democracy through arming all of the workers, and so was the inspiration for the Bolshevik seizure of power in October 1917.
The proletariat, on the other hand, if it wants to uphold the gains of the present revolution and proceed further, to win peace, bread and freedom, must “smash”, to use Marx’s expression, this “ready-made” state machine and substitute a new one for it by merging the police force, the army and the bureaucracy with the entire armed people. Following the path indicated by the experience of the Paris Commune of 1871 and the Russian Revolution of 1905, the proletariat, must organise and arm all the poor, exploited sections of the population in order that they themselves should take the organs of state power directly into their own hands, in order that they themselves should constitute these organs of state power. (Lenin, Third letter from afar).
As well as an inspiration, the Commune also functioned as a warning. According to Bolshevik interpretation, the failure of the Commune lay in its lack of ruthlessness in its dealing with the enemies. Haunted by the Commune’s merciless suppression, the Bolsheviks were at pains to avoid the same fate; hence the ferocity with which Bolshevik terror dealt with those merely suspected of counter-revolution.
d) Jasieński’s path to communism
Jasieński’s evolution from Futurist provocateur to career communist and member of Yagoda’s NKVD court is complicated and not marked by any dramatic conversion.
Jasieński spent World War I in Moscow, and it was here, whilst studying at a Polish school, that he first encountered Mayakovsky, who was to be an abiding influence on Jasieński’s creative and political evolution. A radical poet and an immediately recognizable, handsome actor, Mayakovsky was a very popular and public figure in Moscow. He did not hesitate to put his Futurist innovations and in the service of the Bolsheviks after the October revolution. [4]
When Jasieński's family returned to Poland after the Bolsheviks seized power, he clearly leaned to the left (as his spell in prison for pro-Soviet ‘subversion’ proves), but he was by no means a clear-cut communist at this stage. As he developed his conception of Polish Futurism, he drew very much on Marinetti’s right wing, nationalist Italian Futurism. And while his vision of Polish Futurism had a distinctly socialist flavour, Marinetti’s elitism seems to have rubbed off on Jasieński. Aleksander Wat describes Jasieński as being an ‘arch-snob with a monocle’ during this period, [5] and Witold Zechenter paints a picture of him as an extravagant, eccentric dandy:
He went about dressed eccentrically, with a frock coat that did not match his trousers – light trousers, dark frock coat, maybe made from artistic material – some sort of velvet or corduroy - a coloured shirt, a black satin bow tie, or a red ribbon tied round the collar. Sometimes he even sported a monocle, always a walking stick, a light one with a silver knob.[6]
Bruno Jasieński, by Tytus Czyżewski, from here
After Jasieński announced the death of Polish Futurism in 1924, the Polish Futurists went their separate ways, but the majority of them eventually ended up in the communist camp.
Aleksander Wat explains his own conversion to communism as coming through metaphysical desperation. For him, Futurism led to unbearable nihilism, and communism offered the solace and certainty that comes with religion; Lenin became his ‘idol’ and ‘saviour’. Also, as the Nazi party loomed in Germany and anti-Semitism was on the rise in Poland, it seemed that communism was the only viable alternative.[7]
When he turns to Jasieński’s conversion, Wat pinpoints the deciding factor as being Jasieński’s experience of poverty in Paris:
And when did Jasieński’s communism begin? Jasieński left for Paris with his wife in 1925. His father-in-law, a wealthy merchant in Lwów, had given them some money. But they still had to rough it in Paris. I arrived in Paris in Paris in 1926, at the end of May. He was in very bad straits, and because we saw each other every day, I knew that it was poverty that turned him into a communist... [8]
Indeed I Burn Paris fumes at the divide between the rich and poor in Paris of the late twenties: homeless, unemployed workers fight each other for scraps in bins while the bourgeois and foreign tourists ride around in taxis and dance to American jazz.
e) A Duel With Paul Morand
Paul Morand's Je Brule Moscou, from here
Jasieński ostensibly wrote I Burn Paris in response to Paul Morand’s Je Brule Moscou (I Burn Moscow) (1925), a light, satirical account of the author’s trip to the Soviet Union. There are two elements of Morand’s text which seem to have put Jasieński’s back up. [10]
Firstly, Morand continually mocks Soviet austerity and the deterioration of living standards since 1917:
The stairs looked the same as all stairs since the nationalisation of property, which means they were last scrubbed in October 1917...
... I was proud of my new hat and lambskin coat; I looked like a NEPman who had done alright for himself. I suggested to my companions that we visit the gypsy district. I was asked to speak more quietly. They kept looking round to make sure we weren’t being followed. They refused my request, explaining that it was late and those streets are dangerous. I insisted on getting a bite to eat – since even when there is food in Russia there is no time to eat it – but the comrade who accompanied us got terribly frightened. The mask of the ardent disciple slipped mask and I saw, reflected in his eyes, genuine executioners. The pure – those belonging to the Templar order – should under no circumstances be seen in a dive with a woman, or in the company of a foreigner; and the censor forbade everything, even the word foxtrot, which in Russia is a synonym for capitalist and Western debauchery...[9]
The joke that runs throughout Morand’s story is that everything is being so thoroughly collectivized in Soviet Russia that there is no time or space for bourgeois indulgences such as having sex in private. At the start of the story Morand’s narrator appears to be on course for a night of passion with Vasylissa Abramowna. But once back at her apartment his overtures are continually interrupted by neighbours and a stream of male visitors who are all in love with Vasylissa. Even Lenin manages to intrude:
- What do you think of love?
- I’m not a theoretician. Look it up in Lenin, page one thousand one hundred and twenty-five, tome number nine.
I see that Lenin is Confucius.
- But seriously, if a foreigner falls in love...
The doors open. Nobody enters. Vasylissa answers an invisible person. I hear how they ask for help from influential people. It’s about a passport...
One of Vasylissa’s admirers is a poet, Goldwasser – a thinly-disguised caricature of Mayakovsky:
After returning from Switzerland to Russia in nineteen-seventeen, he started to write propaganda. His poems are printed in different colours, with cut up photographs inside. The regime is indebted to him for agitprop, atheist songs for children, patriotic hymns, odes to soil fertilisation, calligraphy in the form of hammer and sickle, and advertisements for the government’s industrial plants. His verse has mercilessly dressed up the following: songs for the soldiers of the Red Army, the new penal code, food prices, the metric system for peasants and factory regulations. He is dynamic, official and well-off. He is the first Russian who has smiled and does not speak with a lowered voice. Everybody is of the opinion that he has an original style. He works on this. He boxes with words; makes use of ambiguities, everyday expressions, the monologues of madmen, folklore, dialects, peasant sayings, workshop chatter: and all of it shines with voracious erudition.
As Goldwasser, Mayakovsky does not come out at all badly in Morand’s story, but the portrayal seems to have partly provoked Jasieński into writing a riposte. Maybe seeing his literary hero competing for a married woman’s favours in such an undignified manner, in a frivolous satire of the Soviet Union, proved too much for Jasieński. Or maybe Jasieński was looking for a pretext to unleash his plague and taunt the French with the vision of a Soviet style commune in their capital.
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5. The Failure of Proletarian Internationalism
The intellectual rigour of Marxism proved to be far inferior to its emotive power. The great majority who came to believe that Marx had provided a scientific basis for their dreams of social justice never gave a moment’s critical thought to his writings. Marx had unwittingly provided them with yet another substitute religion. [11]
Despite Jasieński’s wishful thinking, Proletarian Internationalism did not become pandemic, but it remains an abiding utopian fantasy.
The fantasy is one of the central doctrines of Marxism, if not the doctrine. For orthodox Marxists, to reject or tamper with Proletarian Internationalism amounts to heresy. Stalin’s thesis of Socialism in One Country was ‘heretical’. The Russian Revolution is said to have failed because it remained isolated; its failure deemed inevitable because communism can only succeed through revolution on an International scale. Trotsky, the supposed good guy, remained faithful to the doctrine of Proletarian Internationalism to the end, which is why he still remains flavour of the month with those who consider themselves true Marxists. [12]
As a central doctrine of Marxism, Proletarian Internationalism is like a battery or the mitochondria in a cell: packed full of intense moral outrage and judgment: it is where Marxism gets all its energy, persuasive power and righteous indignation.
The Communist Manifesto
The Communist Manifesto was written with a rock-solid conviction that the International Proletariat was destined to unite and take the means of production from the control of the bourgeoisie.
This conviction is expressed in the first section of the Manifesto, Bourgeois and Proletarians, which, as schizophrenic panegyric to the bourgeoisie, is by far the most stimulating and libidinally charged part of the Manifesto. These are the core observations and conclusions that are drawn:
- The bourgeoisie did not generate itself, but was rather generated by feudalism.
The bourgeoisie is the most revolutionary class in human history.
The bourgeoisie has created global markets which transcend national boundaries.
Global markets and urbanisation have a progressive, civilizing impact on less developed nations and rural provinces.
However, along with these global markets, the bourgeoisie has unleashed productive forces which it cannot control.
The bourgeois national state needs the proletariat to fight its wars.
7. The proletariat is thus educated by the bourgeoisie and becomes conscious of its shared interests, which are contrary to those of the bourgeoisie.
The first stage of the revolution takes the form of internal, national struggles. However, these civil wars only appear to be national: in fact they are part of the international revolution.
Just as feudalism created the bourgeoisie, the bourgeoisie have created their own successors, the proletariat. International revolution is inevitable.
The Details – quotes from Bourgeois & Proletarians
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1. The bourgeoisie did not generate itself, but was rather generated by feudalism:
We see then: the means of production and of exchange, on whose foundation the bourgeoisie built itself up, were generated in feudal society. At a certain stage in the development of these means of production and of exchange, the conditions under which feudal society produced and exchanged, the feudal organisation of agriculture and manufacturing industry, in one word, the feudal relations of property became no longer compatible with the already developed productive forces; they became so many fetters. They had to be burst asunder; they were burst asunder.
2. The bourgeoisie is the most revolutionary class in human history:
The bourgeoisie, historically, has played a most revolutionary part… It has been the first to show what man’s activity can bring about. It has accomplished wonders far surpassing Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts, and Gothic cathedrals; it has conducted expeditions that put in the shade all former Exoduses of nations and crusades… The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society.
The bourgeoisie, during its rule of scarce one hundred years, has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together. Subjection of Nature’s forces to man, machinery, application of chemistry to industry and agriculture, steam-navigation, railways, electric telegraphs, clearing of whole continents for cultivation, canalisation of rivers, whole populations conjured out of the ground — what earlier century had even a presentiment that such productive forces slumbered in the lap of social labour?
3. The bourgeoisie has created global markets which transcend national boundaries:
The bourgeoisie has through its exploitation of the world market given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country. To the great chagrin of Reactionists, it has drawn from under the feet of industry the national ground on which it stood. All old-established national industries have been destroyed or are daily being destroyed. They are dislodged by new industries, whose introduction becomes a life and death question for all civilised nations, by industries that no longer work up indigenous raw material, but raw material drawn from the remotest zones; industries whose products are consumed, not only at home, but in every quarter of the globe. In place of the old wants, satisfied by the production of the country, we find new wants, requiring for their satisfaction the products of distant lands and climes. In place of the old local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency, we have intercourse in every direction, universal inter-dependence of nations. And as in material, so also in intellectual production. The intellectual creations of individual nations become common property. National one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness become more and more impossible, and from the numerous national and local literatures, there arises a world literature.
4. Global markets and urbanisation have a progressive, civilizing impact on less developed nations and provinces:
The bourgeoisie, by the rapid improvement of all instruments of production, by the immensely facilitated means of communication, draws all, even the most barbarian, nations into civilisation. The cheap prices of commodities are the heavy artillery with which it batters down all Chinese walls, with which it forces the barbarians’ intensely obstinate hatred of foreigners to capitulate. It compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilisation into their midst, i.e., to become bourgeois themselves. In one word, it creates a world after its own image.
The bourgeoisie has subjected the country to the rule of the towns. It has created enormous cities, has greatly increased the urban population as compared with the rural, and has thus rescued a considerable part of the population from the idiocy of rural life. Just as it has made the country dependent on the towns, so it has made barbarian and semi-barbarian countries dependent on the civilised ones, nations of peasants on nations of bourgeois, the East on the West.
5. However, along with these global markets, the bourgeoisie has unleashed productive forces which it cannot control:
Modern bourgeois society, with its relations of production, of exchange and of property, a society that has conjured up such gigantic means of production and of exchange, is like the sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells...
...The productive forces at the disposal of society no longer tend to further the development of the conditions of bourgeois property; on the contrary, they have become too powerful for these conditions, by which they are fettered, and so soon as they overcome these fetters, they bring disorder into the whole of bourgeois society, endanger the existence of bourgeois property. The conditions of bourgeois society are too narrow to comprise the wealth created by them. And how does the bourgeoisie get over these crises? On the one hand by enforced destruction of a mass of productive forces; on the other, by the conquest of new markets, and by the more thorough exploitation of the old ones. That is to say, by paving the way for more extensive and more destructive crises, and by diminishing the means whereby crises are prevented.
6. The bourgeois national state needs the proletariat to fight its wars:
The bourgeoisie finds itself involved in a constant battle. At first with the aristocracy; later on, with those portions of the bourgeoisie itself, whose interests have become antagonistic to the progress of industry; at all times with the bourgeoisie of foreign countries. In all these battles, it sees itself compelled to appeal to the proletariat, to ask for help, and thus, to drag it into the political arena.
7. The proletariat is thus educated by the bourgeoisie and becomes conscious of its shared interests, which are contrary to those of the bourgeoisie:
The bourgeoisie itself, therefore, supplies the proletariat with its own elements of political and general education, in other words, it furnishes the proletariat with weapons for fighting the bourgeoisie.
The advance of industry, whose involuntary promoter is the bourgeoisie, replaces the isolation of the labourers, due to competition, by the revolutionary combination, due to association.
8. The first stage of the revolution takes the form of internal, national struggles. However, these civil wars only appear to be national: in fact they are part of the international revolution:
Though not in substance, yet in form, the struggle of the proletariat with the bourgeoisie is at first a national struggle. The proletariat of each country must, of course, first of all settle matters with its own bourgeoisie.
9. Just as feudalism created the bourgeoisie, the bourgeoisie have created their own successors, the proletariat. International revolution is inevitable:
The development of Modern Industry, therefore, cuts from under its feet the very foundation on which the bourgeoisie produces and appropriates products. What the bourgeoisie therefore produces, above all, are its own grave-diggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable.
end of details
Nation & Class
For the Death of World Imperialism, Moor (Orlov) D.S. (1920)
With regard to Jasieński, his relationship to Poland, and the wider development of Proletarian Internationalism, the key issue here is the conviction (or rather fantastical hope) that the European proletariat was necessarily bound to see its interests as being in conflict with those of its supposedly ‘bourgeois’ home country and identify itself with ‘foreign’ representatives of its class.
As the preface to the Polish edition of the Communist Manifesto (and other writings on Poland) makes abundantly clear, Marx and Engels were staunch supporters of the Polish independence movement: the restoration of an independent and strong Poland is a matter which concerns not only the Poles but all of us. However, their support was not unconditional support for Poland itself: they wanted bourgeois Poland to break the bonds of Russian imperialism and Polish capitalism to have done with Russian absolutist feudalism, because without fully developed capitalism under the organisation of the bourgeois state there could be no proletariat and hence no communist revolution.
Marx and Engels’ support for national independence movements was:
- conditional - on the movement leading to the creation of a class-conscious, revolutionary proletariat (so if the movement suppressed the proletariat, support would be immediately withdrawn)
- parasitic - once the bourgeois independence movement had implemented its revolution, communism would expropriate the revolution from the bourgeoisie.
- & cold-blooded - the peasants had to be fed into the machinery of capitalist upheaval, no matter how much suffering this entailed.
Tom Lewis make no bones about this:
Marx and Engels supported many of the national liberation struggles of their day because they viewed capitalism as a historic advance over feudalism. They were not blind to the misery and devastation that capitalism brought as well, but they understood that capitalism could develop the productive capacities of human society to levels unimaginable under feudalism. They understood further that capitalism brought into existence a class of producers--the proletariat, the modern working class--that for the first time in history was truly collective. This class thereby embodied the potential for democratic self-rule. In the eyes of Marx and Engels, every victory for capitalism over feudalism propelled humanity further toward the goal of freedom from material want and political subjugation.
Marx and Engels’ faith in dialectical materialism leads them to see class conflict as a cast-iron inevitable and prevents them from even entertaining the possibility that the bourgeoisie and proletariat’s economic interests might actually converge at some point and be resolved in a common-sensical trade (e.g. in the kind of deal F.W. Taylor sought to engineer with his Scientific Management).
With orthodox Marxism, class and economic determination is always primary, which means its proponents are theoretically indisposed to considering the possibility that cultural, ethnic, or religious allegiances might go deeper than class divisions (and thus override them). According to the doctrine of Proletarian Internationalism, national allegiance is nothing but the result of a bourgeois trick.
Lenin on the National Question
V. I. Ulyanov taking a walk in the mountains in the vicinity of the small Polish town of Zakopane. Summer 1914.
The ‘national question’ began to vex the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP) in 1903 at the divisive Second Congress. Apart from the famous split into Bolshevik and Menshevik factions, the Congress also had two other items of far-reaching significance on its agenda. [for details, see Tom Lewis]
Firstly, the General Jewish Labour Union, or ‘Bund’, asserted itself, by wanting to be the sole representative of the Jewish proletariat living in Russia, which went against the doctrine of Internationalism.
Secondly, the Congress debated Polish self-determination: the Party had to curtail the revolutionary excesses of its Polish contingent, which wanted to limit Poland’s self-determination to the cultural sphere only, the argument being that “because capitalist development had integrated the economies of Poland and Russia to the point of rendering the idea of a Polish nation-state completely obsolete.” The party brought this faction back into Marxist line, insisting that Poland had a right to political self-determination.
In 1913, Lenin felt the need to spell out his position once again in On The National Question. The following section is crucial, firstly because Lenin identifies the peoples of Finland and Poland as key players in the forthcoming revolution, and because he clarifies the conflict between national and proletarian interest (my emphasis in bold):
The experience of the Revolution of 1905 has shown that even in these two nations the ruling classes, the landowners and bourgeoisie, reject the revolutionary struggle for liberty and seek a rapprochement with the ruling classes of Russia and with the tsarist monarchy because of their fear of the revolutionary proletariat of Finland and Polan
