Schoeck_2010_EnvyATheoryOfSocialBehaviour.pdf

PRIMITIVE REBELS AND SOCIAL BANDITS 409
ceivable. What irritates or angers him-the luxury, perhaps, of the urban
upper class-cannot simply be shared out. A fine carriage, a palace,
expensive clothing and an entourage of servants are property that can be
destroyed but not shared. Their destruction would rarely be in his own
interests, since the extravagance they represent means work for him.
Hence what he seeks from the upper classes is, basically, a ransom. By
contrast with the primitive urban rebels, however, rural areas have
known, for centuries before the French Revolution, social movements,
insurrections and incipient revolutions with a markedly egalitarian character:
everyone must be equal. Anyone who lives off the soil and the
cattle in the field, anyone, that is, who has only a small parcel of land and
one or two beasts, or anyone who works on a farm as a day-labourer, will
not find it difficult to imagine a redistribution of these things. For this
reason many pragmatic communists, like Stalin, have spoken contemptuously
of the egalitarianism of the peasant mentality. For, after all, it
would scarcely be convenient for the communist leader of an industrial
society if his followers were literally to demand their visible share of the
means of production. Such a solution to social claims can be provided
only by private enterprise, whose shares can be distributed as desired.
When the urban populace breaks out, however, as Hobsbawm shows,
it is guided, in many cases very accurately, by envy: it destroys what
belongs to the rich, especially things that are of no use to it. But this
momentary destructive rage does not, unless abetted by an egalitarianminded
bourgeois intellectual class, give rise to a programme from
which a successful revolution might develop.
Hobsbawm discusses in detail the social banditry in Ivan Olbracht's
Czech novel about the bandit Nikola Shuhaj. The bandit is helpless when
confronted by the modern world, which he cannot understand and can
only attack. He would like to destroy it, as Olbracht says, 'to avenge
injustice, to hammer the lords, to take from them the wealth they have
robbed and with fire and sword to destroy all that cannot serve the
common good for joy, for vengeance, as a warning for future ages-and
perhaps for fear ofthem. ,17
This is not only a nihilistic outburst of anger but 'a futile attempt to
eliminate all that would prevent the construction of a simple, stable,
17 Op. cit., p. 25.