Late Marx and the Russian Road. Теодор Шанин

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СКАЧАТЬ of simple accident would be far from Marx’s requirement for a science of society. In consequence and already by 1853 Marx had worked out and put to use the concepts of Oriental Despotism and of the Asiatic Mode of Production, its close synonym, as a major theoretical supplement and alternative to unilinear explanations.⁴

      Marx’s new societal map has assumed the global co-existence of potentially progressive social formations and of essentially static ‘a-historical’ ones. The nature of such static societies, of Oriental Despotism, was defined by a combination of environmental and social characteristics: extensive arid lands and hydraulic agriculture necessitating major irrigation schemes, a powerful state, and state monopoly over land and labour, multitudes of self-contained rural communities tributary to the state. Following Hegel’s turn of phrase, Marx saw such societies as ‘perpetuating natural vegetative existence’,⁵ i.e. showing cyclical and quantitative changes while lacking an inbuilt mechanism of necessary social transformation. Marx’s case-list included China, Egypt, Mesopotamia, Turkey, Persia, India, Java, parts of Central Asia and pre-Columbian America, Moorish Spain etc., and also, less definitely, Russia, defined as semi-Asiatic.⁶ The heterogeneity of global society, the differential histories of its parts, could be easier placed and explained by a heuristically richer scheme – a combination of evolutionary stages of the progressing societies and of the a-historical Oriental Despotisms, with space left between for further categories such as ‘semi-Asiatic’.⁷ Capitalism comes as a global unifier which drags the a-historical societies of Oriental Despotism on to the road to progress, i.e. into the historical arena. Once that obstacle is removed the iron laws of evolution finally assume their global and universal pace.

      The attitude of Marx to colonialism, for long an embarrassment to some of his adherents in the Third World, was fully consistent with those views. Marx abhorred colonial oppression, as well as the hypocrisy of its many justifications, and said so in no uncertain terms. He accepted it all the same as a possible stage on the way of progress towards world capitalism and eventually to world socialism, i.e. a fundamentally positive if terrible step on the long road to the New Jerusalem of men made free.

      In the last period of his work, Marx took a further step towards a more complex and more realistic conceptualisation of the global heterogeneity of societal forms, dynamics and interdependence. The change in Marx’s outlook took shape as an afterthought to Capital Volume I (first published in 1867), and reflected the new experience and evidence of the 1870s.

      Four events stand out as landmarks in the political and intellectual background to Marx’s thought in this period. First, the Paris Commune of 1871 offered a dramatic lesson and a type of revolutionary rule never known before. The very appearance of the ‘dawn of the great social revolution which will forever free mankind from the class-split society’,⁸ had altered the terms of establishment of a socialist society and set a new contemporaneous timetable to it. It also provided the final crescendo to Marx’s activities in the first International which ended in 1872, to be followed by a period of reflection. Second, a major breakthrough within the social sciences occurred during the 1860s and 1870s – the discovery of prehistory which ‘was to lengthen the notion of historical time by some tens of thousands of years, and to bring primitive societies within the circle of historical study by combining the study of material remains with that of ethnography’.⁹ The captivating impact of those developments on the general understanding of human society was considerable, centreing as it did on ‘men’s ideas and ideals of community’¹⁰ – then as now the very core of European social philosophy. Third, and linked with the studies of prehistory, was the extension of knowledge of the rural non-capitalist societies enmeshed in a capitalist world, especially the works of Maine, Firs and others on India. Finally, Russia and the Russians offered to Marx a potent combination of all of the above: rich evidence concerning rural communes (‘archaic’ yet evidently alive in a world of capitalist triumphs) and of direct revolutionary experience, all encompassed by the theory and the practice of Russian revolutionary populism.

      The relation between the new developments in Marx’s thought and his Russian connections has been meticulously, yet dramatically, documented in the work of Haruki Wada, turning a variety of odd pieces of Marx’s late writings, rewritings, amendments and seeming ambivalence into a consistent whole.¹¹ At the turn of the decade Marx became increasingly aware that alongside the retrograde official Russia, which he so often attacked as the focus and the gendarme of European reaction, a different Russia of revolutionary allies and radical scholars had grown up, increasingly engaged with his own theoretical work. It was into the Russian language that the first translation of Capital was made, a decade before it saw light in England. It was Russia from which news of revolutionary action came, standing out all the more against the decline in revolutionary hopes in Western Europe after the Paris Commune.

      In 1870-1 Marx taught himself Russian with the purpose of approaching directly evidence and debate published in that language. In a letter to Engels, his wife complained about the manner in which he applied himself to the new task – ‘he has begun to study Russian as if it was a matter of life and death.’¹² Marx proceeded with similar vigour to study Russian sources, indeed, he turned the books of the Russian radical scholars into his textbooks of language, beginning with Herzen and giving particular attention to Flerovskii and Chernyshevskii. A major library of Russian books, marked and remarked, rapidly accumulated on his shelves and their summaries increasingly entered his notes.¹³

      What followed was a long relative silence, which itself calls for an explanation – Marx did not publish anything substantial until his death. Yet, the direction in which his research and thought were moving emerges from correspondence, notes and re-editions. In an 1870 letter to Engels, Marx praised Flerovskii’s description of the ‘labouring classes’ of Russia – a major populist analysis, as ‘the most substantial book since yours, The Condition of the Working Class….’.¹⁴ He has subsequently added to the very short list of theorists he respected and publicly applauded to a degree alloted previously only to Engels, the name of Nikolai Chernyshevskii. In 1877, Marx rebuked in a letter the ‘supra-historical theorising’, i.e. an evolutionist interpretation of his own writings as related to Russia, and rejected it again, much more specifically, in 1881 in relation to the Russian peasant commune. Marx’s quip of those very times about himself ‘not being a marxist’ was coming true with particular vengeance in so far as Russia was concerned.

      The Russian connection

      An aside concerning Russian revolutionary populism is necessary to place Marx’s new interests, insights and friends for Western audiences. The label ‘populist’, like that of ‘marxist’, is badly lacking in precision; the heterogeneity of both camps was considerable. In Russian speech a populist (narodnik) could have meant anything from a revolutionary terrorist to a philanthropic squire. What makes it worse is the fact that there are today no political heirs to claim and defend the heritage of Russian populism – political losers have few loyal kinsmen, while the victors monopolise press, cash and imagination. Lenin’s major work, from which generations of socialists learned their Russian terminology, used ‘populism’ as a label for a couple of writers who stood at that time on the extreme right wing of the populists, an equivalent of using the term marxism for the so-called ‘legal marxists’ of Russia.¹⁵ This made Lenin’s anti-populist argument of 1898 easier, while increasing the obscurity of the populist creed to his readers of today.

      Populism was Russia’s main indigenous revolutionary tradition. Its particular mixture of political activism and social analysis commenced with A. Herzen and produced a long line of names well known and respected in the European socialist circles, e.g. P. Lavrov, Marx’s personal friend and ally. It reached its full revolutionary potency in the writings of N. Chernyshevskii, and its most dramatic political expression in Marx’s own time in Narodnaya Volya, i.e. the People’s Will party.¹⁶ This clandestine organisation rose to exercise considerable impact during the 1879-83 period and was finally smashed in 1887 by police action, executions and exile.

      Russian СКАЧАТЬ