Late Marx and the Russian Road. Теодор Шанин

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СКАЧАТЬ to us, to last for a long period of time. We are somehow, though stealthily and slugglishly, advancing along the path of economic development. This development now under way is subject to the same law and is in the same direction as the economic development of Western European countries. The village commune has already begun to dissolve…. Among the peasantry, there are being formed different classes of kulaks – peasant aristocrats…. Thus, there already exist in our country at present all the conditions necessary for the formation of the strong conservative classes of farmer-landholders and large tenants, on the one hand, and the capitalist bourgeoisie in banking, commerce and industry, on the other. As these classes are being formed and reinforced … the chance of success for a violent revolution grows more and more dubious…. Either now, or many years ahead, or never! Today, the situation is on our side, but ten years or twenty years from now, it definitely will become an obstacle to us.⁴⁰

      This argument of Tkachev is half way between that of Chernyshevskii and the People’s Will Party. After his encounter with these views, Marx realized that anyone who wanted to debate with Tkachev would have to deal seriously with the question of the Russian village commune and present his own view of Russian society. We have thus good reason to suppose that it was because Marx gave advice of this kind that Engels’s rebuttal to Tkachev took an unexpected turn in its latter half in choosing to confront the ‘social conditions in Russia’ in the fifth article of the series, ‘Literature in Exile’. The materials as well as the logic which Engels used in the writing of this article were provided almost entirely by Marx. Although it bears the signature of Engels alone, the article’s major contents consist of the conclusions which Marx and Engels would have jointly reached after discussion. Engels’s article is well known for its attack upon Tkachev’s supposed failure to understand that socialism was only possible once the social forces of production had reached a certain level of development, and after examining Tkachev’s view of the Russian state threw this remark at him: ‘It is not the Russian state which is suspended in mid-air but rather Mr Tkachev.’ As far as this particular point is concerned, Engels is right in posing a question to Tkachev by asking him whether the ‘suckers of the peasants’ blood’ and ‘largely bourgeois’ who are under heavy protection of the state actually have no vested interest in the continued existence of the state. The data on landholdings of the peasants and the aristocrats which Engels cites in support of his rebuttal are taken from the book by Flerovskii. And where Engels talks about the situations of the peasantry and says that the heavy burdens of redemptions and land taxes are forcing the peasants to become dependent upon the moneylender-kulaks and that speculators are exploiting the peasants by subleasing lands, he obviously depends on the descriptions by Skaldin. These materials are all provided by Marx.

      Next, Engels attacks Tkachev’s assertion that a socialist revolution is possible in Russia ‘because the Russians are, so to speak, the chosen people of socialism and have artel and collective ownership of land.’ Engels’s argument about artel here draws heavily upon the argument of Efimenko which Marx read in the Materials about Artels in Russia. Engels refers also to Flerovskii.⁴¹ It is evident that here too Engels depends on Marx. Summing up his argument about artel, Engels states:

      The predominance of the artel form of organization in Russia proves the existence of a strong drive for association among the Russian people but does not prove by any means that this drive makes possible a jump directly from the artel to the socialist society. For this to be possible it is necessary above all that the artel itself becomes capable of development and divests itself of its original form, in which it serves the capitalists rather than labourers (as we have seen), and at least rises to the level of the Western European co-operative associations.

      The artel in its present form is not only incapable of this, it is necessarily destroyed by large-scale industry unless it is further developed.⁴²

      It is indeed worthwhile to note here that Engels talks about the existence of a ‘strong drive for association’ among the Russian people, for this means that he recognized the two alternative destinies of the artel: its further development or its destruction. This conclusion, it appears, owes much to Marx.

      As regards the question of communal ownership of land, Engels notes that ‘in Western Europe … communal property became a fetter and a brake to agricultural production at a certain stage of social development and was therefore gradually abolished.’ In Russia proper, however, ‘it survives until today, and thus provides primary evidence that agricultural production and the corresponding conditions of rural society are here at a still very undeveloped stage.’⁴³ This perception has much in common with those of Marx and Chernyshevskii. Engels next maintains that the state of complete isolation of the various villages from each other is ‘the natural basis of Oriental Despotism’,⁴⁴ a rather general argument which is set forth even by Bakunin in Appendix A of his Statism and Anarchy. Engels’s assertion that ‘the further development of Russia in a bourgeois direction will destroy communal property gradually in this country also, without any need on the part of the Russian government to interfere with “bayonet and knout” ’ is a criticism directed against the extreme assertion Tkachev made in his open letter to Engels, but is actually not much different from the argument which Tkachev set forth in ‘The tasks of revolutionary propaganda in Russia’. As a matter of fact, Engels here points out Tkachev’s self-contradiction by quoting a passage from the essential part of his article where it is stated that ‘among the peasantry, there are being formed different classes of usurers (kulaks).’ Where Engels points out that ‘under the burden of taxes and usury, the communal property in land is no longer an advantage, but a fetter’, and refers to the peasants running away as migratory workers,⁴⁵ he relies, as he indicates in a footnote, on the description by Skaldin, which was also provided by Marx. Marx might have hesitated to definitively call the rural commune a ‘fetter’, but it is clear that this is not a point around which Engels’s argument pivots.

      In conclusion of his argument, Engels makes the following statement:

      We see that communal property long ago passed its highpoint in Russia, and to all appearances is nearing its doom. Yet there exists, doubtless, the possibility of transforming this social organization into a higher form in the event that it persists until the time when circumstances are ripe for such a change, and in case the institution of communal property proves to be capable of development so that the peasants do not continue to cultivate the land individually but jointly. Society would have to be transformed into this higher form without the Russian peasants going through the intermediate step of bourgeois individual private ownership of land.⁴⁶

      It is clear that this statement, which is in agreement with the conclusion reached by Chernyshevskii (including the use of phrases such as ‘higher form’ and ‘intermediate step’), is the joint view of Marx and Engels in 1875.

      What matters is the condition required for such transformation of the Russian community. Engels underlined the importance of a ‘victorious proletarian revolution’ in Western Europe ‘before the complete disintegration of communal property’, since ‘this would provide the Russian peasant with the preconditions for such a transformation of society, chiefly the material conditions which he needs, in order to carry through the necessary complementary change of his whole system of agriculture.’ This too was a conclusion that could be derived from the assertion of Chernyschevskii. From what we have seen so far it is natural for us to regard this as a conclusion made jointly by Marx and Engels. This does not mean to say that they are not thinking about a Russian revolution. As a matter of fact, this article is concluded with a prophecy of the inevitability of an imminent Russian revolution ‘which will be started by the upper classes in the capital, perhaps by the government itself, but which must be driven further by the peasants beyond its first constitutional phase.’ What is envisaged here is clearly not a mere bourgeois revolution. It is stated furthermore that the revolution ‘will be of the utmost importance for all Europe’ in the sense that ‘it will destroy the last, until now intact, reserve of all-European reaction with one coup.’⁴⁷ СКАЧАТЬ