Late Marx and the Russian Road. Теодор ШанинЧитать онлайн книгу.
here has told me that a fairly animated debate is going on in connection with Capital.52
The ‘Letter to the Editor of Otechestvennye Zapiski’ was written as a refutation of an article entitled ‘Karl Marx before the Tribunal of Mr Zhukovskii’ which Mikhailovskii published in the tenth issue of the same journal in 1877 under the signature of ‘H.M.’. If Marx had actually finished writing his letter or if, after having started to write some part of it, he had chosen not to finish it and send it off, then it would have been nearly impossible for him to refer to this article inaccurately as an ‘article, I guess it was, by Mikhailov’. It would be far more logical for us to assume that he was tempted, partly perhaps stimulated by the conversations with Professor Kovalevskii, to read the article by Mikhailovskii and that only after reading the article did he feel that he should not keep silent.
Mikhailovskii in his article rejected Zhukovskii’s coarse and primitive understanding of Marx’s theory, while at the same time questioning the application of Marx’s theory to the Russian situation. Mikhailovskii first called into question the chapter on ‘The so-called primitive accumulation’ in Capital, and considered that there Marx was expounding a ‘historico-philosophical theory of Universal Progress’. In other words, Mikhailovskii took Marx to be asserting that every country must experience exactly the same process of expropriation of the peasant from the land as had been the case in England. Mikhailovskii then questioned Footnote 9 of the first German edition of Capital where Marx made a mockery of Herzen. Mikhailovskii criticized Marx as follows:
Even judging solely by its overall tone, it can easily be seen what attitude Marx would take towards the efforts of the Russians to find for their country a different path of development from that which Western Europe has followed and is still following – efforts for which there is no need whatsoever to become a Slavophile or to mystically believe in the specially high quality of the Russian nation’s spirit; all that is needed is to draw lessons from the history of Europe.53
Mikhailovskii pointed out that ‘the soul of a Russian disciple of Marx’ was torn apart and that ‘this collision between moral feeling and historical inevitabiity should be resolved, of course, in favour of the latter.’ ‘But the problem,’ Mikhailovskii concluded, ‘is that one should thoroughly assess whether the sort of historical process that Marx described is truly unavoidable or not.’
Clearly Mikhailovskii directed his criticism against exactly those points which Marx himself had already either corrected or entirely struck out.
After reading this article by Mikhailovskii, Marx started writing the letter as he felt he should not remain silent. Since the letter was to be published in a legal journal in tsarist Russia under his own signature, Marx took the necessary precautions: he avoided talking about a revolution, chose to refer to Herzen and Chernyshevskii without explicitly mentioning their names, and on the whole talked in the ‘language of Aesop’. This is why, at first glance, this letter appears equivocal. Nevertheless, anyone who is familiar with the contents of Mikhailovskii’s article and the previous development of Marx’s thought can easily understand what Marx is trying to say.
In the first half of the letter, Marx comments on Mikhailovskii’s critique of the footnote in the first German edition of Capital in which Marx ridiculed Herzen, and points out that Mikhailovskii is utterly mistaken, since ‘in no case can it serve as a key’ to Marx’s views on the efforts of the Russians to find for their country a path of development different from that of Western Europe. Marx then reminds Mikhailovskii that he calls Chernyshevskii a ‘great Russian scholar and critic’ in the postscript to the second edition of Capital, which Mikhailovskii had a chance to read; thus Mikhailovskii, argues Marx, ‘might just as validly have inferred’ that Marx shared Chernyshevskii’s Populist views as to conclude that Marx rejected them. Reserved and brief as these statements are, Marx’s reference to the second German edition – the one in which, as we have noted earlier, he deleted his words of contempt for Herzen that were present in the first edition, and included words of praise for Chernyshevskii – without doubt reveals his sympathetic attitude toward the Russian Populists. Marx goes on to say that he ‘studied the Russian language, and, over a number of years, followed official and other publications that dealt with this question’, and reached this conclusion: ‘If Russia continues along the road which it has followed since 1861, it will forego the finest opportunity that history has ever placed before a nation, and will undergo all the fateful misfortune of capitalist development. ‘54 This is the story told in ‘the language of Aesop’. From 1861 Russia started to follow the path of capitalist development; should it continue to follow the same path, the peasant commune would be destroyed and with it the possibility of proceeding directly towards socialism based on the rural community. Therefore, dear people of Russia, Marx pleads, don’t dare to ‘forego the finest opportunity that history has ever placed before a nation’, the opportunity that is too precious to be wasted. Throughout the period of the Russo-Turkish War, Marx kept looking forward to a Russian revolution which, he expected, would come on the heels of Russia’s defeat in the war, and after the failure of his expectations he felt as if the revolution had just slipped through the people’s fingers. This is exactly why he felt compelled here to remind the Russian people that they should not leave things as they were and thus lose for good the great chance of regeneration. This amounts to an appeal to the Russians to start a revolution right away.
In the second half of his letter, Marx quotes from the French edition of Capital, explains that the chapter on primitive accumulation only traces the path followed in Western Europe, and thus clarifies for the first time what really was his motivation when he revised this chapter in 1875. Marx further maintains that if this historical sketch were to be applied to Russia, the following two points must be made:
(1) If Russia attempts to become a capitalist nation, like the nations of Western Europe … it will not succeed without having first transformed a good part of its peasants into proletarians, and afterwards, (2) once it has crossed the threshold of the capitalist system, it will have to submit to the implacable laws of such a system, like the other Western nations.
It may be possible for us to interpret the second point above as suggesting that if Russia does not cross the threshold of the capitalist system, it need not submit to the implacable laws of capitalism. If our interpretation is correct, then the second point above is not much different from Mikhailovskii’s 1872 interpretation of the preface to Capital.55 On closer reading of Capital, however, Mikhailovskii later began to wonder if he was actually doing justice to Marx’s theory. Marx takes advantage of this wavering in Mikhailovskii’s interpretation and accuses him of twisting his own theory. ‘For him’, asserts Marx, ‘it is absolutely necessary to change my sketch of the origin of capitalism in Western Europe into an historico-philosophical theory of a Universal Progress, fatally imposed on all peoples, regardless of the historical circumstances in which they find themselves, ending finally in that economic system, which assures both the greatest amount of productive power of social labour and the fullest development of man.’ Marx says that ‘this is to do me both too much honour and too much discredit.’ However, the reproach which Marx aims at Mikhailovskii is evidently wide of the mark and irrelevant, for Mikhailovskii’s interpretation cannot be regarded as totally mistaken. It is rather Marx himself who underwent a significant change after he wrote the first German edition of Capital.
Before concluding the letter, Marx emphasized that ‘events which were strikingly analogous, but which took place in different historical environments, led to entirely dissimilar results.’ When Marx made this remark, he had clearly in his mind the opportunity open to the Russian village community in the prevailing historical conditions, in particular the existence of the advanced West and the crisis of capitalism there.
This letter which contains Marx’s second conclusion on the Russian question was not to be sent. Engels later reasoned that Marx chose not to send it because he was ‘afraid that his name would be enough of a threat to the continued existence of the journal’ which was going to print the letter. The true reason, I suppose, was rather that Marx, after reading his letter again, saw something wrong with his critique of Mikhailovskii.
IV
The