Late Marx and the Russian Road. Теодор ШанинЧитать онлайн книгу.
see his letter to Sorge of 5 October 1880, ibid., vol. 34, p. 380. The way Marx (and in the 1880s, Engels) related their attitude to People’s Will to their other contacts is interesting. The very letter of Marx, which spoke admiringly of the human qualities of the members of People’s Will (11 April 1881) described Kautsky as ‘mediocre, not a very able man, self-assured, the “know all” type … admittedly hard working, he spends much time on statistics without getting far with it, naturally belonging to the tribe of “philisters”, while, on the other hand, no doubt, a decent fellow.’ On 23 April 1885, Engels replied to Vera Zasulich’s request to express his views about Plekhanov’s book declaring his marxist creed against the Russian populists (Nashi raznoglasiya) refusing to pass judgment: ‘My friends of People’s Will, did not tell me of those matters’, and then proceeded to defend the People’s Will belief in the chances of an immediate Russian revolution.
42. W. Weitraub, ‘Marx and Russian revolutionaries’, Cambridge Journal, 1949, vol. 3, p. 501.
43. The third Thesis of Feuerbach, Marx and Engels, Selected Works, vol. 1, p. 13.
44. Marx, Pre-Capitalist Economic Formations, op. cit. (Introduction), p. 53. For an interesting discussion of the philosophical differences between Marx and his immediate interpreters, Engels, Kautsky, Plekhanov and Bernstein, etc., see L. Colletti, Introduction to K. Marx, Early Writings, Harmondsworth, 1975, pp. 7-14. See also L. Kolakowsky, Main Currents of Marxism, Oxford, 1981, vol. 1.
45. Marks i Engels, op. cit., p. 272 (the quotation adopted from Maurer). For Engels’s views see his paper ‘Marka’, written in 1882, Marx and Engels, Sochineniya, op. cit., vol. 19, pp. 335-7.
46. See below, p. 108.
47. Ibid., p. 334 (subquotation from Morgan).
48. F. Engels, Anti-Duhring, London 1943, p. 203.
49. Marx and Engels, Sochineniya, op. cit., vols. 21-2 (publications) and 36-9 (correspondence). Thanks are due here to Professor M. Mchedlov of the Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute in Moscow for ascertaining that point. He has pointed out that, on the other hand, Engels did not remove that term from the new editions of Anti-Duhring in 1886 and 1894, an important point open, however, to a variety of interpretations. The explanation offered by Hobsbawm (Marx, Pre-Capitalist Economic Formations, op. cit., p. 51) and by some Soviet scholars that the ‘Asiatic Mode’ is simply substituted at that stage by the broader concept of Archaic Formation does not fully meet the case, i.e. does not explain the correlation between the disappearance of the concept of Oriental Despotism from Engels’s work and the date of Marx’s death.
50. Quoted after Marx and Engels, Selected Works, op. cit., vol. 2, p. 388. For biographical details, see below, p. 177.
51. Ibid., pp. 387-8, 390, 395.
52. Ibid., pp. 403-4.
53. Ibid., pp. 395-412.
54. In the 1890s Plekhanov moved to a sharply ‘anti-peasant’ position, as part of his growing polemic against the populists. Relentless pressure, mixing flattery and cajolery, was applied by him to enlist Engels’s authority in squabbles within the Russian left, for which see Perepiska, Marksa i Engel’sa, Moscow, 1951, pp. 324-46. Engels had on the whole explicitly rejected those pressures, and had shown for a time considerable suspicion of Plekhanov (Walicki, op. cit., pp. 181-3) but was, no doubt, influenced nevertheless, the more so as his Russian was ‘rusty’ by the late 1880s and by his own admission he had stopped reading any sources in that language.
55. Engels’s 1892 letter to Danielson in Perepiska, op. cit., p. 126.
56. Marx and Engels, Selected Works, op. cit., vol. 3, pp. 460 and 469.
57. See, for discussion, Marx, Pre-Capitalist Economic Formations, op. cit. (Introduction), pp. 60-2.
58. Karl Marx, Early Writings, London, 1963.
59. L. Althusser and E. Balibar, Reading Capital, London, 1975. For a British version of the same see B. Hindess and P. Hirst, Pre-capitalist Modes of Production, London, 1975. The next step came when Althusser had discovered Hegelian traces in Capital itself and therefore re-timed Marx’s full ‘maturity’ to ‘The critique of the Gotha Programme’, i.e. 1875 (when Marx was aged 57). L. Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy, New York, 1971, pp. 93-4.
60. ‘Humanism is the characteristic feature of the ideological problematic (which survives alongside science). Science … as exposed in Marx’s better work, implies a theoretical anti-humanism.’ Althusser and Balibar, Reading Capital, op. cit., p. 312 (translation glossary authorised by the author).
61. Nikoforov, op. cit., pp. 113-35.
62. Ibid., pp. 145, 149. See also, for discussion, Gellner, op. cit., from which the expression ‘date of incarnation’ has been gratefully borrowed.
63. See below, p. 103. It seems that the only reasonable interpretation of evidence is indeed that of Hobsbawm: ‘There is – at least on Marx’s part – no inclination to abandon the “Asiatic Mode” … and quite certainly a deliberate refusal to re-classify it as feudal.’ Marx, Preapitalist Economic Formations, op. cit., p. 58 (Introduction).
64. Marx, Pre-Capitalist Economic Formations, op. cit., pp. 32 and 36-37 (Introduction).
65. Marx, Pre-Capitalist Economic Formations, op. cit. (Introduction), p. 16.
66. The quotation is from Marx’s own words in self-defence against a unilinear interpretation of his writing, ‘Letter to Otechestvennye Zapiski’ (1877-8). See Part Two.
67. F. Mehring, Karl Marx: The Story of his Life, London, 1936 (first published 1918), pp. 501, 526. For an example of recent repetition of that view see Chapter 8 of D. McLellan, Karl Marx: His Life and Thought, London, 1977, from which a new generation of Anglo-Saxon students are learning about Marx.
Marx and revolutionary Russia
Haruki Wada
Introduction
In Japan since the late 1960s Marx’s views of Russia in his later years have been a subject of repeated discussion. Indeed, they have been pursued with greater enthusiasm in Japan than elsewhere. Many papers have been written on the subject, and several books have appeared dealing exclusively with it, including my own, published in 1975.1 Needless to say, the motives for taking up this matter differ from one writer to another. There have been all manner of motivations – a desire to understand the true image of the history of Russian social thought, an attempt to identify the place in this history occupied by Plekhanov, who introduced his version of ‘Marxism’ into Russia, a wish to discover in Marx’s studies of Russia in his later years a key to the structure of underdeveloped capitalist economies, an effort to re-evaluate Russian Populism on the basis of the similarities between Marx’s view of Russia in his later years and that of the Populists, a growing interest in Russian peasant communes, and even an attempt to find a recipe for rescuing the highly industrialized Japanese society from the depths of its contradictions. There has even been a heated controversy on the subject carried in the pages of non-academic magazines.
However, even the enthusiasm of today’s Japanese is in no way equal to that with which the Russians at different times discussed this matter in an effort to find the best possible path of development for their own society. When we look at these debates in Russia in retrospect, we realize at the same time that Marx’s theory on Russia was expressed mostly in unpublished letters or drafts of letters, and that the complexity of circumstances under which these letters or drafts were made public has made it peculiarly difficult for one to see what really was Marx’s view of Russia. The writings of Marx himself from which we can infer his thesis on Russia in his later years are the ‘Letter to the Editor of Otechestvennye Zapiski’ and the ‘Letter of Zasulich’ and its four different