{"id":2030,"date":"2023-07-11T20:28:00","date_gmt":"2023-07-11T12:28:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/iraia.net\/blog\/?p=2030"},"modified":"2023-07-14T21:41:58","modified_gmt":"2023-07-14T13:41:58","slug":"tolstoys-anarchism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/iraia.net\/blog\/2023\/07\/11\/tolstoys-anarchism\/","title":{"rendered":"Tolstoy\u2019s Christian-peasant anarchism"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Tolstoy\u2019s Christian-peasant anarchism was more radical than bourgeois liberal reformism but less radical than Marxist proletarian-revolutionary socialism. Lenin recognized Tolstoy\u2019s two-sided role in Russia\u2019s ideological and political spectrum.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Photo. Hertz. Tolstoy on the road from Moscow to Yasnaya Polyana.
Source: https:\/\/en.wikisource.org\/wiki\/The_Life_of_Tolstoy\/Chapter_6#\/media\/File:The_life_of_Tolstoy_091.jpg<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

\u201cOn the one hand, an artist of genius, contributing not only incomparable pictures of Russian life, but literary productions of the first rank that belong to world literature. On the other hand, a landowner, wearing the martyr\u2019s crown in the name of Christ. On the one hand, an extraordinarily powerful, direct, and sincere protest against social lies and hypocrisy; on the other, a Tolstoyan, that is, a worn-out, historical sniveler called the Russian intellectual, who, publicly beating his breast, cries: I am bad, I am vile, but I am striving after moral self-perfection; I no longer eat meat and now live on rice cutlets.\u201d (Lenin, 1908)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cTolstoy transferred the ownership of his estate to his wife and children in 1890, and the following year he publicly renounced the copyrights to all his books.\u201d (Simmons, 1946)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cIn many books printed during Tolstoy\u2019s life we find \u2018no rights reserved.\u2019 Literary property, accordingly, is the common property of mankind.\u201d (Stanoyevich, 1926)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cCommon property of mankind,\u201d take note. Will the petty-bourgeois progressive culturati be able to do what Tolstoy did?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Recalling the progressive Filipino writers I\u2019ve come to know in the past decades, only a few really come close to Tolstoy\u2019s radical lifestyle change and renunciation of private literary copyright: Gelacio Guillermo, and Romulo Sandoval (who sadly died of cancer at a young age).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019m sure there are more. Most of them are probably anonymous writers that are published by the underground press. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

My own position has always been against private intellectual property rights, and in favor of placing creative works in the public domain as a pillar of a more progressive intellectual production regime. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

This leads me in principle to a head-on conflict with progressive writers and artists who support the current imperialist-driven WTO-IPR regime. I tend not to make a huge issue of this, however, being content to refer everyone to something I wrote almost twenty-five years ago on a people’s alternative to IPR<\/a>. #<\/p>\n\n\n\nFollow @junverzola<\/a>