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4. Blagoev vs. the Narodniks The establishment of the Marxist paradigm in Bulgaria has more or less accurately been credited to D. Blagoev. Although a similar ideological fermentation was taking place simultaneously among several of his colleagues—the late 1880s and early 1890s witnessed a slow shifting of paradigms and an ever greater orientation towards Western Marxism —Blagoev was pioneering in articulating and putting on paper a first analysis of Bulgarian socio-economic development within the trajectory of international capitalism. So indeed, his was the first attempt to conceptualize the development of Bulgaria within an evolutionary scheme of history, whereby Bulgaria was not to follow any original developmental course, but would inevitably follow in the footsteps of European civilization and the path that more developed countries had crossed in the process of their socio-economic evolution. Blagoev had probably read Plekhanov’s Our Differences by the end of the 1880s. It formed part of the literature with which the Geneva group was familiar and which it disseminated to local groups in Bulgaria. He wrote What is Socialism under the influence of Engels’ The Development of Socialism from Utopia to Science and the The Communist Manifesto. Blagoev defended his thesis in 1891/1892, arguing not against local populists as would be expected, but rather against the Russian populists resident in Bulgaria at the time. In Shto e sotsializŭm i ima li toi pochva u nas? (What is socialism and has it started in Bulgaria?)61 Blagoev established the Marxist paradigm by arguing against the voluntaristic establishment of socialism, that is, the conviction that the future of the country and the dissemination of socialism depended on the will and the action of the intelligentsia. He argued not only about the scientific basis, but also about the historical inevitability of socialism as the result of a law-abiding process in the development of the relationships of production and the prevalence of capitalism. So “socialism [was] the result of the historical development of humanity” towards higher stages in productive relationships and the result of the capitalist socialization of labor. Blagoev’s narrative con- 186 IV. Caught up in the Contradictions of Modernity tained two very important aspects of popularized Marxism that were to remain also as permanent traits in his socialist reasoning: historical and economic determinism and naturalistic evolutionism. Blagoev sought to prove that capitalism had started in Bulgaria and to confirm the Marxian dictum that as soon as a country has entered the “path of its natural development,” nothing could divert it from its predetermined itinerary. So logically if capitalism had started, socialism had started too, since any change in the economic order automatically implied a change in the social order as well. The equation was valid the other way around as well: the dissemination of socialism depended on how fast or slow capitalism would develop in Bulgaria. (His thinking was characterized by a strong inclination for mathematical reasoning. It comes perhaps as no surprise considering the fact that mathematics was his strongest subject.) Moreover, as soon as socialism was established in one or two states, the rest would be forced to accept it and submit to the laws of evolutionary international development as well. It was, consequently, all a matter of time. In Shto e Sotsializŭm Blagoev totalized the automatic movement of objective social laws, establishing a faith in the revolutionary character of the development of the productive forces themselves, irrespective of other factors. Blagoev’s preoccupation was to demonstrate that post-liberation Bulgaria had entered the orbit of capitalism, that is, that the country was coming increasingly under the influence of foreign economic forms through the intensification of trade and foreign contacts. His strongest thesis, however, was to prove that capitalistic production was becoming the prevalent form of production in Bulgaria. He observed the deterioration of the older forms of production (guilds and crafts), the change in the patriarchal mode of life, the increasing influence of individualism , the intensification of moneyed economy, the increased competition with foreign products leading to the decline of the small cottage industry, the ruin of the small producers, the spread of factories, the creation of new commercial centers, the spreading of poverty, the division of the population into two classes (the capitalists and the proletariat ), the concentration of the land and consequently the concentration of the means of production in the hands of a minority; these were all elements that testified to the change of the economic system. Despite his airtight Marxist argumentation Blagoev...

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