Late Marx and the Russian Road. Теодор Шанин

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      3. K. Marx, Capital, Harmondsworth, 1979, vol. 1, p. 91. The same idea was expressed by Marx also as a heuristic device, specifically modelled after the natural sciences: ‘Human anatomy contains a key to the anatomy of the ape … [which] can be understood only after the animal of the higher order is already known.’ K. Marx, Grundrisse, Harmondsworth, 1973, p. 105 (translation slightly amended).

      4. See ‘The British rule in India’, written in 1853, in K. Marx and F. Engels, Selected Works, Moscow, 1973, vol. 1. E. Hobsbawm described the concept as ‘the chief innovation in the table of historical periods’ introduced in the period when Grundrisse was written, i.e. 1857-8, for which see K. Marx, Pre-Capitalist Economic Formations, London, 1964, p. 32 (Introduction). See also Godelier’s Preface to Sur les Sociétés Pré-Capitalistes, Paris, 1970, L. Krader, The Asiatic Mode of Production, Assen, 1975, and M. Sawyer, ‘The concept of the Asiatic Mode of Production and contemporary Marxism’, in S. Avineri, Varieties of Marxism, The Hague, 1977, and Footnote 7 below. For a good summary of the Soviet debate of that matter by a contemporary Soviet scholar, see V. Nikoforov, Vostok i Vsemirnaya Istoriya, Moscow, 1975, and E. Gelner, ‘Soviets against Witfogel’ (unpublished MS).

      5. G. Hegel, The Philosophy of History, London, 1878, p. 168. The organic metaphor is particularly apt, for no society is assumed to be stationary in the mechanical sense, ‘stagnation’ meaning the over-whelming cyclicity of processes within it.

      6. Russia lacked, of course, ‘hydraulic’ determinants. It was the impact of extensive militarisation and conquest which was assumed to have shaped Russian state and society in an ‘oriental’ manner.

      7. The attraction of the concept of Oriental Despotism as a supplement to the dynamic model of Capital is still potent. For well-argued cases for and against the contempotary usage of the concept within marxist analysis, an issue which does not directly concern us here, see U. Melotti, Marx and the Third World, London, 1977, and P. Anderson, Lineages of the Absolutist State, London, 1970, Appendix B. The recent book by R. Bahro, The Alternative in Eastern Europe, London, 1977, has blunted the conceptual edge of the term by using it as a residual catch-all category for all which is contemporary, yet neither socialist nor capitalist. The most important explanation of Marx’s attitude to heterogeneity of societal developments alternative to the one suggested is that by Hobsbawm in his Introduction to Marx’s Pre-Capitalist Economic Formations, pp. 36-8. Hobsbawm assumes that with the singular exception of the transformation of feudalism to capitalism, Marx’s ‘stages’ of social development have to be understood as analytical categories and not chronologically.

      8. K. Marks i F. Engels, Sochineniya, Moscow, 1961, vol. 18, p. 51 (written by Marx in 1872).

      9. R. Samuel, ‘Sources of Marxist history’, New Left Review, 1980, no. 120, p. 36. See also Nikoforov, op. cit., pp. 81-103.

      10. R. Nisbet, The Social Philosophers, St. Albans, 1973, p. 11. Nisbet described the issue of community as the main axis of the whole history of Western social philosophy.

      11. H. Wada, ‘Marx and revolutionary Russia’ (see p. 40). Wada’s achievement stands out in particular when compared with the work of analysts who ‘knew it all’, i.e. were aware of the evidence, yet made little of it. See, for example, the editorial comments in K. Marx and F. Engels, The Russian Menace to Europe, Glencoe, Illinois, 1952, and many Soviet equivalents to it, especially so in the 1930s.

      12. M. Rubel and M. Manale, Marx without Myth, Oxford, 1975, p. 252.

      13. Marks Istorik, Moscow, 1968, p. 373. The book offers an important contribution to the whole of the issue discussed. The most important earlier study of relevance is that of ‘Marx’s Russian library’, written by B. Nikolaevskii and published in Arkhiv K. Marksa i F. Engel’sa, Moscow, 1929, vol. 4.

      14. Marks i Engels, op. cit., vol. 32, p. 358. Marx has clearly used the superlative ‘most’ referring to a type of book, i.e. the analytical descriptions of contemporary plebeian classes. Two decades later, Plekhanov was hard at work ‘explaining away’ as ill-informed Marx’s admiring comment about this evidently populist book.

      15. The book referred to is The Development of Capitalism in Russia and the populists selected for punishment in it were Danielson (who has signed himself Nikolai-on) and Vorontsov (the V.V.). Lenin, whose admiration of Chernyshevskii was profound, but tempered by the tactical needs of struggle against the Socialist Revolutionary Party (which claimed Chernyshevskii’s heritage), solved it all by naming Chernyshevskii ‘a revolutionary democrat’, semantically unrelated to ‘populism’. This position was often followed by official Soviet publications. For further discussion, see A. Walicki, The Controversy over Capitalism, Oxford, 1969, pp. 16-22.

      16. The word volya meant in nineteenth-century Russian both ‘will’ and ‘liberty’.

      17. For biographical details, see pp. 172-8, this volume. For a selection of relevant writings, see Part Three. For studies of the Russian populist tradition available in English, see in particular F. Venturi, Roots of Revolution, London, 1960, I. Berlin, Russian Thinkers, Harmondsworth, 1979, and Walicki, op. cit. See also T. Dan, The Origins of Bolshevism, London, 1964, chs 3, 6 and 7, and L. Haimson, The Russian Marxists and the Origins of Bolshevism, Boston, 1966. There is considerable Russian literature on the topic of which the most recent is the excellent study by V. Kharos, Ideinye techeniya narodnicheskogo tipa, Moscow, 1980. Contrary to an often held view, the Russian populists did not reject industrialisation but wanted it socially controlled and adjusted to regional needs, ideas which often bridge directly with some of the demands of the most contemporary ‘environmentalists’ and socialists. See Walicki, op. cit., pp. 114-16, and Khoros, op. cit., pp. 36-40, 220-5.

      18. See Part Three, and especially the analysis by Kibalich on pp. 212-18.

      19. See the last wills of members of the People’s Will, pp. 239-40.

      20. Statistika zemlevladeniya 1905 g, St. Petersburg, 1907. The figures referred to the fifty guberya’s of European Russia, i.e. excluded Russian Poland and the Caucasus.

      21. For further discussion of the Russian commune, see G.T. Robinson, Rural Russia under the Old Regime, New York, 1979, T. Shanin, The Awkward Class, Oxford, 1972, and, in Russian, V. Aleksandrov, Sel’skaya obshchina v Rossii, Moscow, 1976, and the general discussion by L. and V. Danilov within Obshchina v afrike: problemy tipologii, Moscow, 1978.

      22. E.g. already Herzen spoke of the need to overcome simultaneously ‘the British cannibalism’, i.e. total surrender to the rules of capitalist competition, and the total immersion of the Russian peasant in his commune, to keep the personal independence of the first and the collectivist élan of the second.

      23. See Venturi, op. cit., chs 20 and 21; also Dan, op. cit., chs 6, 7 and 8. For a good self-description of the Black Repartition group see L. Deutch in V. Nevskii, Istoriko-revolyutsionyi sbornik, Leningrad, 1924, vol. 2, pp. 280-350. For biographical details, see pp. 177-8, this volume.

      24. See below, Part Two. This line of analysis has been reflected subsequently with particular strength in the works of the Russian ‘legal marxists’, e.g. M. Tugan Baranovskii Russkaya fabrica, St Petersburg, 1901, vol. 1, ch. 4.

      25. Central to that line of argument СКАЧАТЬ