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2. The Ideological Roots of Serbian Socialism As conceived by its founder, Svetozar Marković, radicalism was an original synthesis of multiple theoretical socialist influences both of the Eastern and the Western variety. Acknowledging the concrete conditions in their homeland—which was a predominantly agrarian country with weakly developed capitalism, but increasingly exposed to the vicissitudes of the international market and commercial capitalism— the Radicals incorporated the elements that they deemed fit to address their local specificity. The early Radicals were exposed to a variety of theoretical influences such as pre-Marxist French and German socialism (Blanc, Lassalle),9 but also those of Marx, from whom, just as their Russian colleagues, they borrowed not his materialistic philosophy of history, but his vivid description of the horrors of capitalistic development and an analysis driven by economic determinism. Moreover, Marxism, as imported through German channels, would influence the analysis of later Radicals like Lasar Paču, less in the Russian traditional and more in the spirit of Western European social democracy. It was, however, Russian populism (Narodničestvo) that undeniably exercised the strongest influence on the early Radicals, and that may be viewed as the core constitutive doctrine of Serbian radical movement.10 Flourishing in Russia in the 1860s and 1870s, but still very much alive in the 1880s up until the end of the century,11 Populism was a broad current of thought, encompassing a variety of theoretical positions with a common denominator: how to deal with the predicament of modernization and how to prevent the negative social impacts of capitalism in Russia . In other words, how to avoid the horrors of primitive accumulation and the high social price of industrial development. The philosophical premises of Russian populism run counter to a notion of history as a teleologically conceived historical necessity, which as a linear process was the fulfillment of allegedly objective, “iron” historical laws. It was precisely this philosophical standpoint that allowed the Russian Populists to conceive of development as a process of contingency and its materialization as the terrain of human intervention. 66 III. The Ambiguities of Modernity Populism represented not only an ideological reaction to the development of capitalism inside Russia—it was a reaction to the capitalist economy and socialist thought of the West. It reflected not only the problems of small producers in confrontation with large-scale capitalist production; it reflected also specific problems of a backward peasant country in confrontation with highly developed capitalistic states. It was a Russian reaction to Western capitalism and, also, a Russian response to Western socialism—a reaction to Western capitalism and Western socialism by a democratic intelligentsia in a backward peasant country at an early age of capitalistic development.12 Irrespective of the specificity of the Russian case, A. Walicki proposes an even broader perspective, which allows us to view “Russian populism as a particular variant of an ideological pattern, which emerges in different backward societies in periods of transition and reflects the characteristic class position of the peasantry.” It is not, however, a “direct expression of peasant ideology,” but rather “an ideology formulated by a democratic intelligentsia who in backward countries, lacking a strong bourgeois class structure, enjoy as a rule greater social authority and play a more important role in national life than intellectuals in the economically more developed states.”13 The imbroglio of the painful and extended transitional period is stressed also by L. Perović, who suggests that it is precisely the long lingering in an in-between condition that leads to theoretical concoctions envisioning a leaping ahead in social development, whereby “backwardness in reality is compensated through radicalism in ideas and political action.” The desideratum is a short cut to “progress” and the solution is found in political revolution. In order to escape capitalism, Russia would rely on its indigenous institutions of communal ownership and thus achieve the stage the Western socialist theories were proclaiming. “The goal is the take over of state power and the realization of the social revolution through the state. It is the kind of left-wing ideology that develops in agrarian countries with the wish to accelerate the course of history through revolutionary will. At the same time, already from the beginning and due to the weakness of the bourgeoisie, this same ideology becomes a factor of long-lasting petrifaction in society.”14 The envisioned leaping-ahead formula is a national answer to the problem of modernization and has a strongly compensatory character. It was the articulation of intellectuals in agrarian...

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