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Sasha Skochilenko gets seven years in prison: activist artists and dangerous classes (the Lumpen) [1]

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Date: 2023-11-17  

“How little faith does our prosecutor have in our state and society if he thinks that our statehood and public security can be ruined by five small pieces of paper?” She was sentenced to seven years in a penal colony for her protest against Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Are artists, regardless of their bourgeoise patron community and their own petty-bourgeoise lives, members of the Lumpen and also a member of an often romanticized avant-garde artworld group. The moment when one actually makes their work into praxis, the politics dominates and class consciousness emerges.

"I'm not afraid, and maybe that's precisely why my government is so afraid of me," Sasha said in her last statement in court. "How weak is the prosecution’s faith in our state and society if it thinks five little slips of paper could make our statehood and public security collapse?" 33-year-old artist from St. Petersburg, Sasha (Alexandra) Skochilenko, has been in pre-trial detention since April 2022. She is being tried under the military “fake news” law for five stickers containing information about the consequences of the invasion of Ukraine, which she used to replace price tags in a Perekrestok grocery store….Throughout the trial, it often seemed that the Vasileostrovsky District Court and the security forces were tormenting Skochilenko: during a search in her cell, they confiscated medicine for heart disease, and she was denied the opportunity to leave a hearing to replace the batteries in her ECG machine. We publish Sasha Skochilenko’s final statement in court—she calls her case “ludicrous”, pities the state prosecutor, and finds kind words for the investigator who didn’t complete it and resigned from the Investigative Committee. https://t.co/g0Nk7P1hDp

“When a person starts a military rebellion, which caused enormous damage to our country, a criminal case is opened against him and closed within a day. No one suffered from my act, why have I been in custody for more than a year and a half - together with murderers, thieves, seducers of minors and organizers of prostitution. Is my action really comparable to these crimes?"

In some ways, Karl Marx was very much a normal Victorian Gentleman: The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels contains a substantial disquisition on the precipitation of all the members of society into the two main classes: bourgeoisie and proletariat. The disquisition ends: The lower middle class, the small manufacturer, the shopkeeper, the artisan, the peasant, all these fight… [to preserve] their existence…. Reactionary… they try to roll back the wheel of history…. They are revolutionary… only… in view of their impending transfer into the proletariat… And then the flow is broken by a strange digression: The “dangerous class”, [lumpenproletariat] the social scum, that passively rotting mass thrown off by the lowest layers of the old society, may, here and there, be swept into the movement by a proletarian revolution; its conditions of life, however, prepare it far more for the part of a bribed tool of reactionary intrigue… We see this again: Karl Marx: Capital [In] the lowest sediment of the relative surplus population… the sphere of pauperism… [are] vagabonds, criminals, prostitutes, in a word, the “dangerous” classes… And again: Karl Marx: 18th Brumaire The bourgeois republic triumphed. On its side stood the aristocracy of finance, the industrial bourgeoisie, the middle class, the petty bourgeois, the army, the lumpen proletariat organized as the Mobile Guard, the intellectual lights, the clergy, and the rural population. On the side of the Paris proletariat stood none but itself… Charles Dickens, in his second novel Oliver Twist artfully dodged around this much-feared and much-scorned lumpenproletariat, explicating, modeling, parodying, softening, and mocking it all at once Share Brad DeLong's Grasping Reality

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