Late Marx and the Russian Road. Теодор Шанин

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СКАЧАТЬ would be very happy if you would kindly send me that same book.’²⁶

      However, Marx’s Russian studies, which had advanced this far, were now interrupted for a considerable time by the struggle of the Paris Commune and, after its defeat, by the internal fight within the International. It was only after the Hague Congress of September 1872 that Marx returned to theory and the Russian question.

      When he was able to spare time for his theoretical works again, Marx prepared the second German edition of Capital, Volume 1, and published it in early 1873. Except for some rearrangement of chapters and sections, there are not many major changes from the first edition. Important among these few corrections are: (1) the deletion of the exclamation mark, (!), from the passage in the preface we quoted earlier: ‘The country that is more developed industrially only shows, to the less developed, the image of its own future!’; and (2) the deletion of Footnote 9 at the end of the volume in which Marx, as we saw earlier, sneered at Herzen and his ‘Russian communism’. In addition to these changes, Marx in the ‘Postscript to the Second Edition’ paid a glowing tribute to Chernyshevskii by calling him ‘the great Russian scholar and critic’.²⁷ The fact that Marx deleted his disdainful remark about Herzen’s Populism and, furthermore, added a eulogy to the economics of Chernyshevkii clearly reveals that his attitude was undergoing a profound change.

      In the period from the end of 1872 to some time in 1873, Marx read an anthology by Chernyshevskii, Essays on Communal Ownership of Land, published in Geneva immediately before. Of the nine articles collected in the anthology, the two most important are the review (written in 1857) of Haxthausen’s book, Studien über die inneren Zustände, das Volksleben und insbesondere die ländlichen Einrichtungen Russlands [Studies on the internal conditions, the life of the people and in particular the agrarian arrangements of Russia] and the article entitled ‘Criticism of philosophical prejudices against the communal ownership of land’ (1858). In these articles Chernyshevskii pointed out that the communal ownership of land in Russia was by no means a ‘certain mysterious feature peculiar only to the Great Russian nature’, but was something that survived till that day as ‘a result of the unfavourable circumstances of historical development’ in Russia which were drastically different from those in Western Europe. But anything that has a negative side ought to have a positive side as well. Among ‘these harmful results of our immobility’ there are some which are ‘becoming extremely important and useful given the development of economic movements which exist in Western Europe’, and which ‘have created the sufferings of the proletariat.’²⁸ Among these, thought Chernyshevskii, was the communal ownership of land.

      When certain social phenomena in a certain nation reach an advanced stage of development, the evolution of phenomena up to this same stage in other backward nations can be achieved much faster than in the advanced nation…. This acceleration consists of the fact that the development of certain social phenomena in backward nations, thanks to the influences of the advanced nation, skips an intermediary stage and jumps directly from a low stage to a higher stage.²⁹

      On the basis of such a theoretical premise, Chernyshevskii thought that, given the development of the advanced West … it would be possible for Russia to leap from communal ownership of land directly to socialism. Chernyshevskii sums up his view in the following terms:

      History is like a grandmother; it loves the younger grandchildren. To the latecomers (tarde venientibus) it gives not the bones (ossa) but the marrow of the bones (medullam ossium), while Western Europe has hurt her fingers badly in her attempts to break the bones.³⁰

      Marx was deeply impressed by this view.³¹ It is my contention that Marx went as far as to accept it as rational, and also to conceive it possible that, given the existence of the advanced West as a precondition, Russia could start out from its village commune and proceed immediately to socialism. Only by this inference can we reach a coherent understanding of his view in 1875.

      That Marx was deeply interested in the question of the Russian village commune is evident from his letter to Danielson dated 22 March 1873, in which he asked for information on the origins of the village commune.³² Of the books which Danielson sent to Marx in response to this request, Materials About Artels in Russia (1873) and a book by Skaldin, In a Faraway Province and in the Capital (1870), were of importance, and Marx read these two volumes earnestly.³³

      II

      The new view which Marx formulated on the basis of his studies up to that time can be inferred from a correction made in the French edition of Capital, published in January 1875, and from an article by Engels written in April 1875, ‘The social conditions in Russia’.

      Let us first consider the correction made in the French edition of Capital. There is in Chapter 26, ‘The secret of primitive accumulation’, a passage which reads as follows in both the first and second German editions:

      The expropriation of the agricultural producers, of the peasant, from the soil, is the basis of the whole process. The history of this expropriation, in different countries, assumes different aspects, and runs through its various phases in different orders of succession, and at different periods. In England alone, which we take as our example, does it have the classic form.³⁴

      In the French edition this passage was struck out and replaced by a new one:

      At the bottom of the capitalist system is, therefore, the radical separation of the producer from the means of production…. The basis of this whole evolution is the expropriation of the peasants.… It has been accomplished in a final form only in England … but all the other countries of Western Europe are going through the same movement.³⁵

      An obvious implication of this correction is that the English form of the expropriation of the peasants is applicable only to Western Europe, or to put it differently, Eastern Europe and Russia may follow a completely different path of evolution. Thereafter Marx quotes only from the French edition whenever he refers to the passage above.

      The essay by Engels was a byproduct of his polemic with P.N. Tkachev. The polemic was started by Engels when, by way of criticizing P.L. Lavrov, he took up Tkachev’s pamphlet, ‘The tasks of revolutionary propaganda in Russia’ (1874), and ridiculed him as a ‘green schoolboy’.³⁶ In a furious rage, Tkachev responded with the publication of a German pamphlet, ‘Offener Brief an Herrn Friedrich Engels’ [Open Letter to Mr Friedrich Engels] in Zurich at the end of 1874.

      Upon reading this open letter by Tkachev, Marx handed it over to Engels with a brief note written on it:

      Go ahead and let him have enough of a beating, but in cheerful mood. This is so absurd that it seems Bakunin has had a hand in it. Pyotr Tka[chev] wishes above all else to prove to his readers that you are treating him as your opponent, and for that purpose he discovers in your argument points that do not exist at all.³⁷

      These words of Marx show that he found in Tkachev’s open letter to Engels something reminiscent of the argument of Bakunin, and advised that Engels had better treat him as an idiotic opponent.

      I deduce that Marx read Tkachev’s ‘The tasks of revolutionary propaganda in Russia’ only after he read this open letter to Engels. Marx left behind him his copy of the former pamphlet in which he underlined passages here and there.³⁸ Reading this pamphlet he must have realized that Tkachev was fairly well versed in the social realities in Russia. In contrast to Engels, who wrote of Tkachev’s assertion that he ‘could not wait for a revolution’ – ‘Why, then, do you gentlemen keep chattering and making us sick of it? Damn you! Why don’t you start one right away?³⁹ – Marx was more impressed by the accompanying analysis which formed the basis of Tkachev’s assertion that he ‘could not wait’.

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