Late Marx and the Russian Road. Теодор Шанин

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СКАЧАТЬ In this paper, Potash declared that the concluding passage of Marx’s letter to Zasulich – which stated that in order for the village commune to serve as ‘the point of support of a social regeneration of Russia … the poisonous influences that attack it from all sides must be eliminated, and then the normal conditions of a spontaneous development insured’ – was the passage that was ‘especially wide open to question’.¹⁵ A strong rebuttal of this view came from A. Ryndich, who maintained that Marx obtained his view of the Russian village commune as a ‘result of the long and detailed studies of the primary sources on Russia after the Reform’, and thus emphasized the significance of the concluding passage of Marx’s letter to Zasulich.¹⁶ However, in his rejoinder that accompanied Ryndich’s paper, Potash had to say that Ryndich’s piece was being printed precisely because ‘it reveals the true nature of all those whose stance is that of a revision of the Leninist view.’¹⁷ In the crucial year 1929, Potash represented the mainstream.

      I

      Marx’s attitude towards Russian Populism at the time of the publication of Volume 1 of Capital in 1867 seems to have been utterly negative. In appended Footnote 9 at the end of the first German edition of Capital, Marx writes high-handedly:

      If, on the European continent, influences of capitalist production which destroy the human species … were to continue to develop hand in hand with competition in the sizes of national armies, state security issues … etc., then rejuvenation of Europe may become possible with the use of a whip and through forced mixture with the Kalmyks as Herzen, that half-Russian and perfect Moskovich, has so emphatically foretold. (This gentleman with an ornate style of writing – to remark in passing – has discovered ‘Russian’ communism not inside Russia but instead in the work of Haxthausen, a councillor of the Prussian Government.)¹⁸

      Herzen’s view that the Russian village commune was unique to the Slavic world was considered merely laughable by Marx at that time. Marx thought it was to be found everywhere, and was no different from what had already been dissolved in Western Europe.

      Everything, to the minutest details, is completely the same as in the ancient Germanic community. All that has to be added in the case of the Russians are … (i) the patriarchal nature … of their community and (ii) the collective responsibility in such matters as payment of taxes to the state…. These are already on their way to decay.¹⁹

      Something like this cannot form a basis for a socialist development; this, I am sure, was the way Marx looked at the Russian peasant commune. For he wrote in the preface to the first German edition of Capital, ‘The country that is more developed industrially only shows, to the less developed, the image of its own future!’²⁰ At this stage, it appears, he supposed that Russia, like Germany, would follow the example of England.

      Marx’s thinking, however, began to change once he mastered the Russian language and became able to pursue his Russian studies using primary sources, and especially once he came across the studies of N.G. Chernyshevskii. Needless to say, this change in Marx’s attitude towards Russian Populism did not take place overnight.

      Marx first wanted to study the Russian language in October 1869 when N.F. Danielson, a young Russian who asked his permission to translate Capital into Russian, sent him a copy of V.V. Bervi-Flerovskii’s newly published book, The Situation of the Working Class in Russia; Marx felt he would like to read this solid book by himself. He immediately started learning Russian, and learned it very quickly; by February 1870 he managed to read as many as 150 pages of Flerovskii’s book.²¹ Marx found Flerovskii’s book completely free from the sort of ‘Russian “optimism” ’ that was evident in Herzen.

      Naturally, he is caught up by fallacies such as la perfectibilité de la proprieté perfectible de la Nation russe, et le principle providentiel de la proprieté communale dans sa forme russe. [The perfectable property of the Russian Nation, and the providential principle of communal property in its Russian form.] This, however, does not matter at all. Examination of his writing convinces one that a dreadful social revolution … is inevitable and imminent in Russia. This is good news.²²

      In spite of Flerovskii’s Populism, Marx thus appraised his descriptions of the social realities on Russia very highly, because they clarified the inevitability of a Russian revolution.

      Having finished reading Flerovskii’s work, Marx then tackled an article, ‘Peasant reform and communal ownership of land (1861-1870)’, which appeared in Narodnoe Delo, No. 2, an organ of the Russian Section of the International, the organization which, through its member Utin, once asked Marx to convey its membership application to the first International. Marx felt friendly towards Utin and his group because of their opposition to Bakunin and Herzen, but his attitude toward their Populist view of the Russian village commune was basically unchanged. While reading this paper, Marx wrote a word of rejection, ‘Asinus’[!], at various points. And beside a passage where the differences in the development of communities in Russia and the West are discussed, he wrote down the following comment: ‘Dieser Kohl kommt darauf heraus, daß russische Gemeineigentum ist verträglich mit russischer Barbarei, aber nicht mit bürgerlicher Civilization!’ [From this rubbish, it emerges that Russian communal property is compatible with Russian barbarism, but not with bourgeois civilization.]²³

      It is clear from this that at this stage Marx continued to find nothing significant in the Russian village commune.

      However, his view began to change as a result of the discussions he had with German Lopatin, who visited Marx in July 1870 and who, while staying with Marx in order to work on the Russian translation of Capital, talked very highly of Chernyshevskii. Marx first read ‘Comments on John Stuart Mill’s Principle of Political Economy’ by Chernyshevskii and found the author generally very capable.²⁴ He then seems to have started to read a paper of Chernyshevskii’s on the peasantry, though we do not know which particular one this was. Nevertheless, there is no doubt that reading this paper was a turning point; Marx began to see Populism and the village commune of Russia in a different perspective.

      This can be seen from a letter by Elizaveta Dmitrievna Tomanovskaya, a member of the Russian Section of the International, who visited Marx towards the end of 1870. In this letter dated 7 January 1871, Tomanovskaya writes:

      As regards the alternative view you hold about the destinies of the peasant commune in Russia, unfortunately its dissolution and transformation into smallholdings is more than probable. All the measures of the government … are geared to the sole purpose of introduction of individual ownership through abolition of the practice of collective guarantee.

      She asked if Marx had already read the book by Haxthausen; she offered to send him a copy in case he had not. She goes on:

      This includes many facts and verified data about the organization and management of the peasant commune. In the various papers on the communal ownership of land you are reading now, you may notice tht Chernyshevskii frequently refers to and quotes from this book.²⁵

      This clearly shows that Marx either told or wrote to Tomanovskaya that he was reading Chernyshevskii’s paper on the Russian peasant commune, and that he thought it worthwhile to consider the question raised by Chernyshevskii, that is, the Populist question, about the ‘alternative’: was the communal ownership of land going to be dissolved? Or was it going to survive to form the lynchpin of Russia’s social regeneration? Marx’s view had changed a great deal.

      We do not know whether Marx at this time was given Haxthausen’s book by Tomanovskaya or not, but there is no doubt that he now became interested in the conservative councillor of the Prussian government whom he had once scoffed at. It is therefore not a mere accident that Marx wrote at the end of his letter to L. Kugelmann dated 4 Februry 1871: ‘Once СКАЧАТЬ