seizure of power. Here he displayed a certain ambivalence towards the Bolsheviks. He argued that their regime was offering a radical version of the "bourgeois revolution," with a parliamentary system and unfettered capitalism. This Machajski viewed as the inescapable outcome of socialist politics which would place the intelligentsia as a class in power. Thus Machajski argued that the Bolsheviks were an updated version of the Jacobins of the French Revolution. Their democratisation of the bourgeois system would only benefit the lower strata of the intelligentsia but offer nothing to the workers. Ideas Influenced by Bakunin, he argued – in opposition to Karl Kautsky – that the class interest of intellectuals, including Marxist social democrats, was opposed to that of manual workers, since the unproductive labour of intellectuals depended upon preserving a hereditary monopoly on education at workers' expense. Rather than put their hopes in political revolution, manual workers needed to concentrate upon pressing their economic demands through a mass general strike, until their wages equalled those of the intellectual worker and there could be a socialization of knowledge. Revolution would consist of a violent revolt of the unemployed worker-peasant. Machajski thus attempted a theoretical synthesis of anarchist political critique and Marxist political economy and theory of history (historical materialism), by applying the Marxist critique of class-dominated ideology to Marxism itself. Machajski theorised a "state capitalist" moment of social development, approximating the seizure of power by intellectuals of the state apparatus, and the oppression of the working class by intellectuals acting to further capitalism in its dying days. In comparison, Machajski theorised socialism as the direct political control of economic institutions by the working class itself. Machajski's contributions foreshadowed the debate over the nature of the Soviet Union and the Soviet-style societies, including the critiques of Leninism, Stalinism and Maoism. Works Machajski wrote predominantly in Russian. His writing is more available in Polish or French than English, though commentary on his ideas exists in English. Scientific Socialism (1899) The Evolution of Social Democracy (1899) The Intellectual Worker (1905) An Unfinished Essay in the Nature of a Critique of Socialism See also Anarchism and Marxism References Further reading Gouldner, Alvin W., Prologue to a Theory of Revolutionary Intellectuals, Telos, No. 26 (Winter 1975–76), pp. 3–36 Shatz, Marshall (1989). Jan Waclaw Machajski: a radical critic of the Russian intelligentsia and socialism. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press. External links 1866 births 1926 deaths Anti-capitalists