Late Marx and the Russian Road. Теодор Шанин

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СКАЧАТЬ of Marx’s analytical thought suggested by Engels – German philosophy, French socialism and British political economy – should in truth be supplemented by a fourth one, that of Russian revolutionary populism. All that is easier to perceive when looked at in the late twentieth century, but the massive brainwashing of interpretation initiated by the second International is still powerful enough to turn it into a ‘blind spot’.

      To proceed with that line of argument somewhat further in order to test it, the other major departure of Marx from an evolutionist view which assumed an inexorable course of history towards capitalist centralisation, and used the index of global economic ‘progress’ in political judgment, was also related to a direct experience of struggle at the close ‘peripheries’ of capitalism sensu strictu. The Fenian Rebellion of the Irish made Marx write to Engels in 1868, ‘I used to think that Ireland’s separation from England would be impossible. Now I consider it to be inevitable.’ (italics added)³⁶ As a leader of the International he had also taken a public stand in that matter. In 1867 Marx defined Irish independence and the setting up of protective tariffs against England, together with agrarian revolution, as the country’s major needs. Not only the conclusion but also the way he argued his case were important steps from the nineteenth-century ideas of progress towards the understanding of what our own generation would call ‘dependent development’ and its pitfalls. In the same year Marx spoke also of the way the Irish industry was being suppressed and its agriculture retarded by the British state and economy. By 1870 Marx went so far as to say that, ‘The decisive blow against the ruling classes in England (and this blow is decisive for the working man’s movement all over the world) is to be struck not in England but only in Ireland.’³⁷ With full awareness of what such a stand might mean at the very centre of metropolitan nationalism, he called British workers to support the Irish independence struggle. The beautiful phrase coined in the days of their revolutionary youth by Engels, that ‘people who oppress other people cannot themselves be free’,³⁸ came back, this time with a distinctly ‘Third-Worldish’ sound.

      Secondly, Marx asserted his political preferences loud and clear. His sympathy was with fighters and revolutionaries, be the ‘small print’ of their creed as it may, and against doctrinaire marxists, especially when on theoretical grounds they rebuked revolutionary struggle. That was clear when he wrote of the Paris communards ‘storming heaven’ in 1871. In his Critique of the Gotha Programme (1875) he scorned socialists who ‘keep themselves within the limits of the logically presumable and of the permissible by the police’.³⁹ The members of People’s Will on trial for life were to him not only right in the essentials of their political stand but ‘simple, objective, heroic’. Theirs was not ‘tyrannicide as “theory” and “panacea” but a lesson to Europe in a “specifically” Russian historically inevitable mode of action; against which any moralising from a safe distance was offensive.’⁴⁰ In contrast he had sharply turned against their critics in Plekhanov’s Black Repartition group in Geneva.⁴¹

      It has been the way of many sophisticates of marxology to scoff at such utterances of Marx or to interpret them patronisingly as ‘determined rather by … emotional motives’⁴² (an antonym, no doubt, of ‘analytical’, ‘scientific’ or ‘sound’). To understand political action, especially the struggle for a socialist transformation of humanity, as an exercise in logic or as a programme of factory building only, is utterly to misconstrue it, as Marx knew well. Also, he shared with the Russian revolutionaries the belief in the purifying power of revolutionary action in transforming the very nature of those involved in it – the ‘educating of the educators’.⁴³ The Russian revolutionary populists’ concern with moral issues found ready response in him. Moral emotions apart (and they were there and unashamedly expressed), revolutionary ethics were often as central as historiography to Marx’s political judgment. So was Marx’s distaste of those to whom the punch-line of marxist analysis was the adoration or elaboration of irresistible laws of history, used as the license to do nothing.

      Finally, and especially after Marx’s death, the difference of emphasis between Marx and Engels came to anticipate a dualism which was increasingly conspicuous within the post-Engels marxist movement. Hobsbawm’s caution against the ‘modern tendency of contrasting Marx and Engels, generally to the latter’s disadvantage’ must be kept in mind here, but also its qualification: ‘the two men were not Siamese twins.’⁴⁴ The two were partners, allies and friends, while Engels’s devotion to Marx and his heritage has justly become famous. On a number of issues it was Engels who led and, indeed, often taught Marx, especially in so far as political and military issues were concerned. All that is not at issue, however. In his views Engels was less inclined to move in the new directions Marx explored in the last decade of his life. Despite Engels’s warnings against treating marxism as a form of economic determinism, he had been much more than Marx a man of his own generation with its evolutionist, ‘naturalist’ and ‘positivist’ beliefs. The same is even more true for Kautsky as the later chief interpreter of Marx and for the mainstream Russian interpretation of Marx by Plekhanov.

      When still working shoulder to shoulder, Marx and Engels had felt alike about the past; the medieval peasant commune in its Germanic version was to both of them ‘the only kernel of popular liberty and life’⁴⁵ of that period. They agreed about the corrosive influences of capitalism on the peasant commune and that only revolution could save it in Russia. They both assumed that it was worth saving – to be integrated and transformed into the new socialist era. But to Engels, the future of the Russian commune was inevitably subject to proletarian revolution in the West, itself part of the irresistible march of ‘progress’. The basic order of things could not be changed. Marx was moving away from such views (though how far he had moved by 1882 will be forever a matter of debate). Also, while Engels bowed to Marx’s supreme knowledge of the ‘East’ and its peculiarities, the very heterogeneity of structure and motion round the globe were to Engels less of a problem, less of a bother and less of a trigger to new analysis.

      The best way to test the differences between the two men is to consider Engels’s writings after Marx’s death. In mid-1884, in the space of two months, he wrote his immensely influential The Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State, ‘in fulfilment of bequest to Marx’ and using his conspectus of Morgan’s study. The book was brilliant in its discussion of the ‘archaic’ social structures, yet in its other parts offered a virtual compendium of evolutionism with a dialectical ‘happy end’ to conclude. In it, and engined by the ever deepening ‘division of labour’, are historical stages, following each other with the precision, repetition and inevitability of clockwork, for ‘what is true for nature holds good also for society.’⁴⁶ It all proceeds to progress unilinearly from the ‘infancy of the human race’ to ‘the highest form of the state, the democratic republic in which alone the decisive struggle between proletariat and bourgeoisie is to be fought’. Then comes socialism, the ‘revival in a higher form of the liberty and fraternity of the ancient gentes’.⁴⁷ Since mid-1884 not even Oriental Despotism seemed essential for historiography, and the very term disappeared from Engels’s published work. In Anti-Duhring (1877), still written in Marx’s powerful presence, Oriental Despotism spread ‘from India to Russia’.⁴⁸ It is never mentioned in The Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State. In Engels’s known correspondence the concept appears last in February 1884. As from then and until Engels’s death in 1895, through the whole bulk of nearly 3,000 pages of his writings and letters, it was not mentioned even once.⁴⁹ We are back all the way to The German Ideology of 1846. It had been in its time a dramatic breakthrough of major illumination and a conceptual base to the Communist Manifesto (1848) with its immense and lasting impact. It was now a retrograde step.

      Engels wrote well, his style served by his capacity to present complex issues with simplicity, strength and impeccable consistency of argument. There was a price to that clarity, however, and Engels’s argument with Tkachev is a case in point.

      Peter Tkachev was a Russian Jacobin, a historical materialist whose class analysis made him СКАЧАТЬ