Late Marx and the Russian Road. Теодор ШанинЧитать онлайн книгу.
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’.
Of course, we cannot expect this social condition, which is convenient 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