A pæan to Svetozar Marković

Having been on something of a ‘Balkans kick’ recently, I decided to tackle Woodford McClellan’s political biography of Svetozar Marković, the tragically short-lived first socialist theorist of the Balkans. Marković is a singularly fascinating figure who – in my view – stands at the very spot where socialism and distributism, at least in its radical-agrarian Eastern European sense, begin to diverge. Although a narodnik student of Chernyshevsky, he flirted with a broad range of intellectual influences, from Marx to Bakunin to Dühring. As a result, his socialism was a highly syncretist brew of a number of different convictions – sometimes contradicting. Though he had a sincere and naïve faith in the power of scientific knowledge to guide all human inquiry (including in ethics and religion), his practically-Slavophil sympathy for the peasantry, his distaste for revolution and his emphasis on the need to adapt theory to ‘local conditions’ set him apart from practically all of his Marxist contemporaries, with the possible exception of Karl Kautsky. The successes of Marković as a publicist can be seen in the fact that socialism nowhere enjoyed a greater following (apart from in Russia) than in Serbia of his time. The agrarian-distributists and left-anarchists as well as the socialists who came after him would come to see him as an intellectual forerunner. However, he clearly leaned (as did Tawney) to the socialist side.

McClellan’s monograph doubles as both a biography and as a history of Serbian left politics. For a figure such as Svetozar Marković such a format seems deeply appropriate: even though he died at the age of 28, all of the Balkan socialists, communists and radicals who followed him would say that they ‘learned their political ABC’s from Marković’. However, such importance attaching to the figure of Marković seems ironic for a number of reasons – his early death from congenital illness compounded by a torturous imprisonment being only one of them. McClellan deeply admires his subject, but is not blind to his flaws. The Marković he portrays in this careful and multi-layered work is a pugnacious polemicist and intellectual pugilist; but his sharp intellect, owing partly to the eagerness of youth, is not able to compass many of the broad theoretical contradictions in the thought of his intellectual heroes. In addition, he has a broad egotistical streak, a flair for the dramatic, and a certain romanticism of outlook that prohibits him from being an efficacious politician when the crucial moments come. Still, McClellan gives Marković a good deal of credit: he never went overboard into nihilism, and his abiding faith in the Serbian peasantry prevented his thought from venturing into totalitarian territory.

The Marković family hailed from occupied Kosovo, but moved to Donja Sabanta (and later Kragujevac) after Svetozar’s great-uncles killed a Turk in an act of private justice, the Turk having molested one of his great-aunts. Svetozar’s father Radoje had been an adherent of Karađorđe and his family in the dynastic feud between the Karađorđevići and the Obrenovići. Radoje married well – the daughter of the village prefect – and had two sons: the elder Jevrem in 1839, and the younger Svetozar in 1846. Svetozar went to a series of public schools, from grammar up through university – and his experiences with the stern and often-abusive teachers throughout his education instilled in him a deep and abiding distaste for the traditional pædagogy (a trait he shares with his Coptic comrade of a younger generation, Salama Musa). During his school years he was an adherent – as were most of his classmates – of the radical-liberalism of Vladimir Jovanović, and also a member of Jovanović’s youth movement Omladina (a society based on Mazzini’s Young Italy), advocating the liberation of Serbia and the adoption of a constitutional monarchy.

After his secondary schooling, however, Marković studied abroad in Russia and at once fell under the intellectual sway of Russia’s foremost narodnik theorist, Nikolai Chernyshevsky (author of What Is to Be Done? and the literary bête noire of Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground). Marković joined the Smorgon Academy, a veritable hotbed of narodnik and nihilist radicalism, and there formed the friendships and connexions that would inform the rest of his life of the intellect. Marković’s one constant influence from which he never wavered was that of Chernyshevsky. He garnered a number of insights from Marx, and from the popularisers of Feuerbach, Darwin and several others – but he always grounded them in the convictions of Chernyshevsky’s agrarian populism.

Svetozar Marković’s international horizons would broaden from a trip to Zürich. He was a gadfly to a number of meetings of radicals from around Europe, including the League of Peace and Freedom and the First International. He made the acquaintances of Bakunin and Marx, as well as Victor Hugo, Charles Longuet and Amand Goegg. It was a mark of Marković’s breadth of political imagination, if also his theoretical vagueness, that he was able to speak good words of all of the programmes of Bakunin, Lassalle and Marx – but find nothing good to say about the bourgeois French republicans led by Hugo. His distaste for bourgeois republicanism and liberalism as insufficiently radical would follow him back to Serbia.

When Marković returned from Russia, he found that the Serbian liberals – including Jovanović, whom he had so admired in his student days – had essentially ‘sold out’. The vast majority of the Omladina had joined the government of Prince Milan Obrenović and the ranks of the fledgling Serbian bureaucracy, and were busying themselves securing their own positions and advancing their own interests rather than advocating for greater autonomy or greater social rights for the vast majority of Serbians, who were still on the land and suffering from eviction, debt, usury and bureaucratic intransigence. Marković immediately set about founding a new radical youth movement which was strident in its opposition to the government, and to Jovanović in particular. This would begin one of a long series of no-holds-barred scorched-earth intellectual feuds between the uncompromising polemicist Svetozar Marković and a number of more liberal-leaning and pro-establishment Serbs. During this time, however, Marković also developed friendships with radicals and insurrectionaries in Bulgaria – most importantly that with Lyuben Karavelov.

Marković’s ‘eclectic, ethical socialist’ thought at this time, when he published ‘The Realist Direction in Science and Life’, was at its most Marxist in hue. He embraced materialism and scientism with both arms, and Darwin was his lodestar. The application of the scientific method and mindset, Marković believed, would eventually solve all of humanity’s problems – even the ethical. The highest, most advanced and most evolved ethics, he held, were those of Robert Owen, Ján Hus and Jesus Christ. Marković parted with the socialist proclaimers of free love and defended monogamous ‘matrimony’ (as distinguished from a propertarian understanding of ‘marriage’) on what we would now consider evolutionary-psychological grounds. And he held the narodnik belief that the Slavic East – including Russia, Bulgaria and Serbia – would be able to find an agrarian road to socialism that wouldn’t go through the oppressive travails of capitalism.

In the early phase of Marković’s Serbian career, he directed a coöperative movement similar to Raiffeisen’s and Krek’s, or the Grange here in the United States. His coöperatives unfortunately suffered from the same problems that hindered the Grange and the Populists here – lack of enthusiasm; competition among members of the coöperative; predatory anti-competitive practices by private lenders and producers. Suffice it to say that Marković’s movement itself was short-lived. He also founded a newspaper, Radenik, which served as an outlet for his harsh criticisms of the government and of various liberal intellectuals, bureaucrats and businessmen. In many ways, Radenik was a sister-publication to the Bulgarian Svoboda (Lyuben Karavelov’s journal which served as an informational and propaganda vehicle for the Bulgarian revolutionaries). It also had a limited reach: it appealed primarily to socialists, and to intellectual radicals of the ‘opposition’ – liberals out-of-favour with a liberal government. It had cachet, but little real traction among the peasantry it claimed to speak for. It still caused consternation in the government, however. Its publishers were harassed, its issues confiscated, and it was eventually forced to shut down. Marković himself was forced into exile in Novi Sad, in Vojvodina.

Marković published prolifically in Novi Sad. He put out a book, Serbia in the East, which argued for Serbia’s separate agrarian path to socialism in more nuanced terms, and also put forward a ‘bottom-up’ version of Yugoslavism in which the local communes would play the ultimate part in horizontally uniting the Balkans. Aided by his caring, sympathetic and convinced elder brother Jevrem, Svetozar’s cause attracted intellectuals like Nikola Pašić, military men like Sava Grujić, and even Orthodox priests like Vasa Pelagić. He developed a strong friendship (and perhaps also romantic attachment) to a pair of sisters in Novi Sad, Milica and Anna Ninković, who were at once drawn to his radical narodnik ideas and became his steadfast supporters both intellectually and practically. He began laying plans for a revolt in Hercegovina, which would come to fruition after his death. And he also broke, dramatically, with Mikhail Bakunin over anarchism, which (for reasons similar to those held by Morris and Berdyaev) he could not embrace. He began refining his socialist political thought into a cogent programme; in this he further distanced himself from Marx. It was preposterous to think that Marx’s thought could be adapted to Serbia without accounting for the predominance of the peasantry and the absence of both a proletariat and an industrial business class. The exploiters in Serbia were kulaks, usurers and bureaucrats.

For Marković, the poverty and oppression of the peasant at the hands of landlords, kulaks, usurers and bureaucrats was intolerable, and the effete and inadequate legal protections provided by the liberal government infuriating. The further impoverishment and ‘primitive accumulation’ from the peasant in the name of establishing capitalism as a necessary stage in Serbia’s œconomic development, as demanded by the doctrinaire Marxists, was likewise indefensible to him. Though he acknowledged and endorsed the validity of Marxist theory in the West, where class divisions were already manifest and a proletariat had already been created, he could never bring himself to countenance the full political ramifications of Marxist thought in the Slavic East. He was firm in the narodnik conviction that the Slavic countries could forge their own path to socialism without going through capitalism.

Eventually, however, he made the determination to return to Belgrade (where he was promptly arrested, though released on bail) and start another journal: Javnost. Javnost was very unlike Radenik in tone: it was impassive rather than polemical; analytical rather than denunciatory. It was here that Marković took up his spirited defence of the peasant zadruga as the vehicle for the peasant’s self-liberation and the achievement of a radical œconomic democracy. However, the conclusions of Javnost were no less unwelcome to the Serbian government, and its staff came in for no less harassment and legal action.

Many of the charges from the government were nonsensical. He was accused of libelling and maligning various members of government (though he maintained he had printed nothing but truth). He was accused of disloyalty to Serbia and of insulting the Prince. And he was accused – probably with his father’s services to Prince Aleksandar Karađorđević in mind – of harbouring dynastic sympathies for the exiled Karađorđevići. Marković mostly laughed these charges off. He wasn’t straightforward enough a republican to admit so explicitly, but if he did have any dynastic sympathies they were instead with the ruling house of Montenegro, and in particular with Prince Nikola I Petrović-Njegoš (maternal grandfather of King Aleksandar of Yugoslavia), whom Marković apparently regarded as a progressive ruler.

Marković, along with one of his associates, Dimitrije Stojković, was arrested on these charges and put on trial. It seems Marković had planned to make the best of his arrest: he used his trial to grandstand in defence of socialism and to attack the government and legal system as unjust, and apparently did such a good job of it that Serbian peasants gathered in Kragujevac en masse in protest of the trial.

Marković was of course found guilty and sentenced to 18 months in gaol – an effective death sentence, given his poor health and consumptive constitution. Javnost was forced to cease publication, but Marković continued to write from prison. Once released he sought out his brother Jevrem to recuperate, but to little avail – and he began another newspaper, Oslobođenje, which was shut down even more quickly than Javnost. However, Marković’s thought continued to evolve away from Marxism: he began to distrust the intellectuals and put more and more trust in the peasants themselves to self-organise and self-advocate. He also, in the last days of his life, embraced the Orthodox faith to which he had been a stranger since his school days. As he was dying of consumption in the city of Trst, he sought out Fr Bogoljub (Toponarski) and asked for confession and last rites, which were given. He also asked the priest to send for his brother, who didn’t make it in time. Only Fr Bogoljub and the deacon at the local Church of Saint Spyridon were present at the funeral of Svetozar Marković.

McClellan clearly considers the legacy of Marković with a mixture of sympathy and tragedy. Though he takes no more favourable a view of the viability of Marković’s ideas within his own time and place than the later Yugoslav historians do, he clearly prefers the principles on which Marković professed his peasant-populism. And he also manifestly has a more generous evaluation of Marković’s significance in Balkan intellectual life in mind – because he does trace the independent evolution of Yugoslav œconomic democracy and zadrugarstvo to the influence and ideas of Marković. Just as Fei Xiaotong was the unsung hero of Taiwan’s œconomic miracle, so too was Svetozar Marković a tutor to Tito in his healthier moments.

Though Svetozar Marković was not a distributist (his zadrugarstvo was, in the final analysis, a familial-communal collectivism in land rather than a loose coöperativism of private holdings), the distributists too would do well to look to his legacy in order to better understand the popularity of their own œconomic doctrine in Eastern Europe. The distributists did best when they flocked at least some distance to the distinctly redder-hued flag of Marković, like his intellectual successors Sterea and Madgearu in Romania, or Stamboliyski in Bulgaria. And even in our own day, we can and should consider Marković more carefully as non-Western countries attempt to forge their own œconomic paths out of the late-capitalist blind alley we’re in. As we face a looming global œcological disaster, we are in dire need of œconomic alternatives to capitalism and a ‘convergence’ that never quite seems to happen – alternatives, indeed, that are adaptable to ‘local conditions’ as Marković envisioned.