Marx's Russian Moment (Marx, Engels, and Marxisms) [1st ed. 2023] 3031296613, 9783031296611

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MARX, ENGELS, AND MARXISMS

Marx’s Russian Moment

Vesa Oittinen

Marx, Engels, and Marxisms

Series Editors Marcello Musto, York University, Toronto, ON, Canada Terrell Carver, University of Bristol, Bristol, UK

The Marx renaissance is underway on a global scale. Wherever the critique of capitalism re-emerges, there is an intellectual and political demand for new, critical engagements with Marxism. The peer-reviewed series Marx, Engels and Marxisms (edited by Marcello Musto & Terrell Carver, with Babak Amini, Francesca Antonini, Paula Rauhala & Kohei Saito as Assistant Editors) publishes monographs, edited volumes, critical editions, reprints of old texts, as well as translations of books already published in other languages. Our volumes come from a wide range of political perspectives, subject matters, academic disciplines and geographical areas, producing an eclectic and informative collection that appeals to a diverse and international audience. Our main areas of focus include: the oeuvre of Marx and Engels, Marxist authors and traditions of the 19th and 20th centuries, labour and social movements, Marxist analyses of contemporary issues, and reception of Marxism in the world.

Vesa Oittinen

Marx’s Russian Moment

Vesa Oittinen Philosophy and Russian Studies University of Helsinki Helsinki, Finland

ISSN 2524-7123 ISSN 2524-7131 (electronic) Marx, Engels, and Marxisms ISBN 978-3-031-29661-1 ISBN 978-3-031-29662-8 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-29662-8 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover credits: © Fine Art Images/Heritage Images This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Titles Published

1. Terrell Carver & Daniel Blank, A Political History of the Editions of Marx and Engels’s “German Ideology” Manuscripts, 2014. 2. Terrell Carver & Daniel Blank, Marx and Engels’s “German Ideology” Manuscripts: Presentation and Analysis of the “Feuerbach chapter,” 2014. 3. Alfonso Maurizio Iacono, The History and Theory of Fetishism, 2015. 4. Paresh Chattopadhyay, Marx’s Associated Mode of Production: A Critique of Marxism, 2016. 5. Domenico Losurdo, Class Struggle: A Political and Philosophical History, 2016. 6. Frederick Harry Pitts, Critiquing Capitalism Today: New Ways to Read Marx, 2017. 7. Ranabir Samaddar, Karl Marx and the Postcolonial Age, 2017. 8. George Comninel, Alienation and Emancipation in the Work of Karl Marx, 2018. 9. Jean-Numa Ducange & Razmig Keucheyan (Eds.), The End of the Democratic State: Nicos Poulantzas, a Marxism for the 21st Century, 2018. 10. Robert X. Ware, Marx on Emancipation and Socialist Goals: Retrieving Marx for the Future, 2018. 11. Xavier LaFrance & Charles Post (Eds.), Case Studies in the Origins of Capitalism, 2018. v

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TITLES PUBLISHED

12. John Gregson, Marxism, Ethics, and Politics: The Work of Alasdair MacIntyre, 2018. 13. Vladimir Puzone & Luis Felipe Miguel (Eds.), The Brazilian Left in the 21st Century: Conflict and Conciliation in Peripheral Capitalism, 2019. 14. James Muldoon & Gaard Kets (Eds.), The German Revolution and Political Theory, 2019. 15. Michael Brie, Rediscovering Lenin: Dialectics of Revolution and Metaphysics of Domination, 2019. 16. August H. Nimtz, Marxism versus Liberalism: Comparative RealTime Political Analysis, 2019. 17. Gustavo Moura de Cavalcanti Mello and Mauricio de Souza Sabadini (Eds.), Financial Speculation and Fictitious Profits: A Marxist Analysis, 2019. 18. Shaibal Gupta, Marcello Musto & Babak Amini (Eds.), Karl Marx’s Life, Ideas, and Influences: A Critical Examination on the Bicentenary, 2019. 19. Igor Shoikhedbrod, Revisiting Marx’s Critique of Liberalism: Rethinking Justice, Legality, and Rights, 2019. 20. Juan Pablo Rodríguez, Resisting Neoliberal Capitalism in Chile: The Possibility of Social Critique, 2019. 21. Kaan Kangal, Friedrich Engels and the Dialectics of Nature, 2020. 22. Victor Wallis, Socialist Practice: Histories and Theories, 2020. 23. Alfonso Maurizio Iacono, The Bourgeois and the Savage: A Marxian Critique of the Image of the Isolated Individual in Defoe, Turgot and Smith, 2020. 24. Terrell Carver, Engels before Marx, 2020. 25. Jean-Numa Ducange, Jules Guesde: The Birth of Socialism and Marxism in France, 2020. 26. Antonio Oliva, Ivan Novara & Angel Oliva (Eds.), Marx and Contemporary Critical Theory: The Philosophy of Real Abstraction, 2020. 27. Francesco Biagi, Henri Lefebvre’s Critical Theory of Space, 2020. 28. Stefano Petrucciani, The Ideas of Karl Marx: A Critical Introduction, 2020. 29. Terrell Carver, The Life and Thought of Friedrich Engels, 30th Anniversary Edition, 2020. 30. Giuseppe Vacca, Alternative Modernities: Antonio Gramsci’s Twentieth Century, 2020.

TITLES PUBLISHED

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31. Kevin B. Anderson, Kieran Durkin & Heather Brown (Eds.), Raya Dunayevskaya’s Intersectional Marxism: Race, Gender, and the Dialectics of Liberation, 2020. 32. Marco Di Maggio, The Rise and Fall of Communist Parties in France and Italy, 2020. 33. Farhang Rajaee, Presence and the Political, 2021. 34. Ryuji Sasaki, A New Introduction to Karl Marx: New Materialism, Critique of Political Economy, and the Concept of Metabolism, 2021. 35. Kohei Saito (Ed.), Reexamining Engels’s Legacy in the 21st Century, 2021. 36. Paresh Chattopadhyay, Socialism in Marx’s Capital: Towards a Dealienated World, 2021. 37. Marcello Musto, Karl Marx’s Writings on Alienation, 2021. 38. Michael Brie & Jörn Schütrumpf, Rosa Luxemburg: A Revolutionary Marxist at the Limits of Marxism, 2021. 39. Stefano Petrucciani, Theodor W. Adorno’s Philosophy, Society, and Aesthetics, 2021. 40. Miguel Vedda, Siegfried Kracauer, or, The Allegories of Improvisation: Critical Studies, 2021. 41. Ronaldo Munck, Rethinking Development: Marxist Perspectives, 2021. 42. Jean-Numa Ducange & Elisa Marcobelli (Eds.), Selected Writings of Jean Jaurès: On Socialism, Pacifism and Marxism, 2021. 43. Elisa Marcobelli, Internationalism Toward Diplomatic Crisis: The Second International and French, German and Italian Socialists, 2021. 44. James Steinhoff, Automation and Autonomy: Labour, Capital and Machines in the Artificial Intelligence Industry, 2021. 45. Juan Dal Maso, Hegemony and Class Struggle: Trotsky, Gramsci and Marxism, 2021. 46. Gianfranco Ragona & Monica Quirico, Frontier Socialism: Selforganisation and Anti-capitalism, 2021. 47. Tsuyoshi Yuki, Socialism, Markets and the Critique of Money: The Theory of “Labour Notes,” 2021. 48. Gustavo Moura de Cavalcanti Mello & Henrique Pereira Braga (Eds.), Wealth and Poverty in Contemporary Brazilian Capitalism, 2021. 49. Paolo Favilli, Historiography and Marxism: Innovations in MidCentury Italy, 2021.

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TITLES PUBLISHED

50. Levy del Aguila Marchena, Communism, Political Power and Personal Freedom in Marx, 2021. 51. V. Geetha, Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar and the Question of Socialism in India, 2021. 52. Satoshi Matsui, Normative Theories of Liberalism and Socialism: Marxist Analysis of Values, 2022. 53. Kei Ehara (Ed.), Japanese Discourse on the Marxian Theory of Finance, 2022. 54. Achim Szepanski, Financial Capital in the 21st Century, 2022. 55. Stephen Maher, Corporate Capitalism and the Integral State: General Electric and a Century of American Power, 2022. 56. Rémy Herrera, Confronting Mainstream Economics to Overcome Capitalism, 2022. 57. Peter McMylor, Graeme Kirkpatrick & Simin Fadaee (Eds.), Marxism, Religion, and Emancipatory Politics, 2022. 58. Genevieve Ritchie, Sara Carpenter & Shahrzad Mojab (Eds.), Marxism and Migration, 2022. 59. Fabio Perocco (Ed.), Racism in and for the Welfare State, 2022. 60. Dong-Min Rieu, A Mathematical Approach to Marxian Value Theory: Time, Money, and Labor Productivity, 2022. 61. Adriana Petra, Intellectuals and Communist Culture: Itineraries, Problems and Debates in Post-war Argentina, 2022. 62. Kolja Lindner, Marx, Marxism and the Question of Eurocentrism, 2022. 63. Marcello Mustè, Marxism and Philosophy of Praxis: An Italian Perspective from Labriola to Gramsci, 2022. 64. Lelio Demichelis, Marx, Alienation and Techno-capitalism, 2022. 65. Terrell Carver, Smail Rapic (Eds.), Friedrich Engels for the 21st Century: Perspectives and Problems, 2022. 66. Alexandros Chrysis, The Marx of Communism: Setting Limits in the Realm of Communism, 2022. 67. Paul Raekstad, Karl Marx’s Realist Critique of Capitalism: Freedom, Alienation, and Socialism, 2022. 68. Marcello Musto, Rethinking Alternatives with Marx, 2022. 69. José Ricardo Villanueva Lira, Marxism and the Origins of International Relations, 2022. 70. Bertel Nygaard, Marxism, Labor Movements, and Historiography, 2022.

TITLES PUBLISHED

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71. Marcos Del Roio, Gramsci and the Emancipation of the Subaltern Classes, 2022. 72. Marcelo Badaró, The Working Class from Marx to Our Times, 2022. 73. Jean Vigreux, Roger Martelli, & Serge Wolikow, One Hundred Years of History of the French Communist Party, 2022. 74. Vincenzo Mele, City and Modernity in George Simmel and Walter Benjamin: Fragments of Metropolis, 2023.

Titles Forthcoming

Spencer A. Leonard, Marx, the India Question, and the Crisis of Cosmopolitanism Joe Collins, Applying Marx’s Capital to the 21st century Jeong Seongjin, Korean Capitalism in the 21st Century: Marxist Analysis and Alternatives Marcello Mustè, Marxism and Philosophy of Praxis: An Italian Perspective from Labriola to Gramsci Shannon Brincat, Dialectical Dialogues in Contemporary World Politics: A Meeting of Traditions in Global Comparative Philosophy Francesca Antonini, Reassessing Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire: Dictatorship, State, and Revolution Thomas Kemple, Marx’s Wager: Das Kapital and Classical Sociology Xavier Vigna, A Political History of Factories in France: The Workers’ Insubordination of 1968 Attila Melegh, Anti-Migrant Populism in Eastern Europe and Hungary: A Marxist Analysis Marie-Cecile Bouju, A Political History of the Publishing Houses of the French Communist Party Mauro Buccheri, Radical Humanism for the Left: The Quest for Meaning in Late Capitalism Tamás Krausz, Eszter Bartha (Eds.), Socialist Experiences in Eastern Europe: A Hungarian Perspective

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TITLES FORTHCOMING

Martin Cortés, Marxism, Time and Politics: On the Autonomy of the Political João Antonio de Paula, Huga da Gama Cerqueira, Eduardo da Motta e Albuquer & Leonardo de Deus, Marxian Economics for the 21st Century: Revaluating Marx’s Critique of Political Economy Zhi Li, The Concept of the Individual in the Thought of Karl Marx Lelio Demichelis, Marx, Alienation and Techno-capitalism Salvatore Prinzi, Representation, Expression, and Institution: The Philosophy of Merleau-Ponty and Castoriadis Agon Hamza, Slavoj Žižek and the Reconstruction of Marxism Éric Aunoble, French Views on the Russian Revolution Patrizia Dogliani, A Political History of the International Union of Socialist Youth Alexis Cukier, Democratic Work: Radical Democracy and the Future of Labour Christoph Henning, Theories of Alienation: From Rousseau to the Present Daniel Egan, Capitalism, War, and Revolution: A Marxist Analysis Emanuela Conversano, Capital from Afar: Anthropology and Critique of Political Economy in the Late Marx David Norman Smith, Self-Emancipation: Marx’s Unfinished Theory of the Working Class Tomonaga Tairako, A New Perspective on Marx’s Philosophy and Political Economy Matthias Bohlender, Anna-Sophie Schönfelder, & Matthias Spekker, Truth and Revolution in Marx’s Critique of Society Mauricio Vieira Martins, Marx, Spinoza and Darwin: Materialism, Subjectivity and Critique of Religion Aditya Nigam, Border-Marxisms and Historical Materialism Fred Moseley, Marx’s Theory of Value in Chapter 1 of Capital : A Critique of Heinrich’s Value-Form Interpretation Armando Boito, The State, Politics, and Social Classes: Theory and History Anjan Chakrabarti & Anup Dhar, World of the Third and Hegemonic Capital: Between Marx and Freud Hira Singh, Annihilation of Caste in India: Ambedkar, Ghandi, and Marx Salvatore Engel-Di Mauro, An Introduction to Ecosocialism Mike Berry, A Theory of Housing Provision under Capitalism Maria Chehonadskih, Alexander Bogdanov and Soviet Epistemologies: The Transformation of Knowledge After the October Revolution

TITLES FORTHCOMING

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Peter Lamb, Harold Laski, the Reluctant Marxist: Socialist Democracy for a World in Turmoil Raju Das, Marxism and Revisionism Today: Contours of Marxist Theory for the 21st Century Gary Teeple, The Democracy That Never Was: A Critique of Liberal Democracy Alfonso García Vela & Alberto Bonnet, The Political Thought of John Holloway: Struggle, Critique, Emancipation Erick Omena, Urban Planning as Class Domination: The Games of Land Dispossession

Preface

Introduction Why “Marx’s Russian Moment”? The fact that Marx became from around 1870 on increasingly interested in Russian matters is a topic that has occupied many scholars. To mention only some Western studies, the anthology on the late Marx and the “Russian Road”, edited by Teodor Shanin, was published by the Monthly Review Press already in 1983 and has been followed e. g. by the works of Kevin B. Anderson and James White.1 In all these works, one of the main questions has been posed quite right: the problem of Russia as a periphery of capitalist development, where capitalist production relations do not play the same role as in their “classical” land, England, which was studied by Marx and had provided the materials for Capital. In Russia, Marx (and Engels) encountered for the first time (if we except the case of Ireland) the problem of uneven global development of capitalism and all the problems it created for the strategy of socialist revolutionaries. In this respect, Czarist Russia reminded us of the dependent economies, especially those of Latin America today, where the tasks of progressive and Left forces are posed in a manner different from those in the capitalist metropolises. Even Russia’s early revolutionary movement, the Narodniks, had some likeness with the left-populist movements in the global South, at least in regard to their utopism and voluntarism.

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The scope of this book is, however, somewhat different. In the essays published here, the main focus is rather on the theoretical and methodological challenges which Marx met when he turned to Russian realities. The well-known and much-studied correspondences with Mikhailovsky in 1877 and Vera Zasulich in 1881 (which can be called rather one-sided as most of the answers Marx drafted were never sent) already posed a philosophical problem besides the concrete one of the role of the Russian peasant communities: the question of historical necessity. In his foreword to the first German edition of Capital (1867), Marx had written about “the natural laws of capitalist production” and said that his book will deal with the “question of these laws themselves, of these tendencies working with iron necessity towards inevitable results”, which leads to the conclusion that an industrially more developed country shows to the less developed “the image of its own future”.2 The Narodnik journalist Nikolai Mikhailovsky could quite justifiably ask, how the “iron necessity” of this process should be interpreted in the case of Russia. After all, in Russia the process would not advance automatically, without the consciousness of the participants, since now we already know how capitalism functions, mainly thanks to the oeuvre of Marx himself. How does the consciousness concerning the “natural” (automatic) processes—the famous causarum cognitio—change the way they affect human communities? That Marx did not answer at once to Mikhailovsky’s question indicates, if not a downright hesitation, at least that he found the problem worthy of deliberation. It goes without saying that Marx could not accept Mikhailovsky’s voluntaristic position, the Narodnik stance which stressed the role of individual activism and later has been called “subjective sociology”. But obviously, at the bottom of the whole problematics there was a complicated dialectics of freedom and necessity, or, to put it in the terms of political action, determinism and voluntarism. This was a dialectic that required constant consideration and could not be quickly solved by some phrases.3 A further aspect of the challenges of “philosophical” nature Marx met when confronting Russian realities can be discerned in a phenomenon highlighted later by Lukács: that in a peripheric country, some trends of the dominant world order may come to the fore earlier than in the metropolis. One such phenomenon which I deal with here is the problematics of terrorism, described by Dostoevsky in his novel The Possessed. Although Dostoevsky’s own solutions to this question are, as Lukács

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states, reactionary, the Russian writer nevertheless posed the vexing question which he saw as inherent in the modern world. Marx and Engels viewed terrorism and “ultra-Leftism” as a transient problem only, which would disappear when the socialist movement reaches maturity. This was their viewpoint for assessing Bakunin’s activities, too. Yet Lenin shared the same illusion when he in the early 1920s described the ultra-leftist currencies of the Communist movement as a “children’s disease” (detskaia bolezn’ ) which would soon be overcome. Our present-day experience tells a different story: ultra-Leftism and terrorism are a constant feature of the political scene of modern societies and cannot be explained away as something ephemeral only. To mention an additional example of Russian realities producing a “forecast” of developments yet to come in the West can be seen in the ideology theory. As I try to show, Marx’ and Engels’ views on ideology stood in the wake of the Enlightenment discourses on the préjugés, although adding to it the socio-economic and class dimensions. But in Russia in the first years of the twentieth century, the “empiriomonism” of Aleksandr Bogdanov challenged this received Marxian view. It was a theoretical construct that in several respects foreshadowed the Western developments which took place only after the Second World War or even later, in the 1960s. Only then, it became more fashionable to interpret Marx’s ideas in the light of the subjectivist philosophies of post-classical bourgeois thought. The epochal significance of this turn of the mainstream of bourgeois thought towards irrationalism was diagnosed only much later by some Marxist authors, most conspicuously by Georg Lukács in his Die Zerstörung der Vernunft (1954). Marx and Engels never noted the full weight of this trend of bourgeois philosophy, and the first important thinkers who in the latter half of the nineteenth century inaugurated the epoch of post-classical irrationalism, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, remained completely out of the scope of their interests. For this reason, although both Marx and Engels were in their epistemological views adherents of the classical correspondence theory of truth, it became rather easy to ascribe them to a subjectivist theory of cognition in the wake of the new irrationalism. In Russia, Aleksandr Bogdanov foreshadowed these tendencies by several decades. He thrust upon Marxism the epistemological ideas of the fin-de-siècle Austrian positivism. As a result, there are in Bogdanov’s doctrine many points that are astonishingly similar to the positions of Louis Althusser concerning the nature of ideology which the

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latter began to put forth in the 1960s. For some reason, this connection has hitherto not been noted in the steadily growing literature on Bogdanov. The other essays in this book highlight some less-known aspects of Marx’s and Engels’s occupation with Russian themes, such as Nikolai Ziber’s attempt to write a work parallel to Marx’s ethnographic studies and Engels’s Origin of the Family, the State and the Private Property, or Marx’s and Engels’s attitude to Pan-Slavism especially during the 1848 revolution and the misinterpretation of their intentions in later Soviet publications. The piece on Marx and Finland was initially intended as an introduction to a planned anthology on the history of the Finnish Marx reception, which, however, was not realised. I believe that its publication here is defensible since Finland was for the most part of the nineteenth century a part—albeit an autonomic one—of Russia. The essays published here are based on conference presentations or other papers which originally have not been written in English, and all have not been hitherto published. In translating them, I have modified the texts often in a substantial manner. Nevertheless, this book remains a collection of essays and not a monograph on Marx’s “Russian moment”. I hope, however, that it might contribute to a further discussion on the subject. These essays would never have been written without the inspiring support of my friends and colleagues in the Finnish Marx Society, which has already for 25 years functioned as a meeting place for fruitful discussions, and of the Aleksanteri Institute, the centre for Russian and East European studies at the University of Helsinki. I am especially grateful to the previous and present directors of the Institute, Dr. Markku Kivinen and Dr. Markku Kangaspuro, for making my research work possible. Special thanks I owe to Prof. Marcello Musto, who initially gave me the idea to publish the texts in English in the series edited by him. Without his initiative, this book would never have been written. And lastly, I would like to thank my wife Marja Naapuri for her patience and help during the long writing process. Helsinki, Finland March 2023

Vesa Oittinen

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In the romanisation of Cyrillic, I have followed the BGN/PCGN system when giving the references. However, in the main text, the Russian names have been given in the conventional standard form (e.g. “Mikhailovsky” instead of “Mikhailovskij”). In referring to texts of Marx and Engels, I have used either the Marx-Engels Gesamtausgabe (MEGA), or the Marx-Engels Collected Works (MECW) published by Lawrence and Wishardt.

Notes 1. Teodor Shanin (ed.), Late Marx and the Russian Road. Marx and the ‘Peripheries of Capitalism’, New York: Monthly Review Press 1982; Kevin Anderson, Marx at the Margins, 1st edition 2010 (University of Chicago Press); James White, Marx and Russia: The Fate of a Doctrine, London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019. 2. Marx, Capital I , MECW vol. 35, p. 9. 3. It is, though, strange that Marx did not answer to Mikhailovsky’s accusations about the “iron necessity” with whom he had described the economic laws of capitalism, by referring to what Engels wrote in Anti-Dühring: “Freedom does not consist in any dreamt-of independence from natural laws, but in the knowledge of these laws, and in the possibility this gives of systematically making them work towards definite ends” (MECW vol. 25, p. 105). Engels had been working on the Anti-Dühring (published in 1877 and 1878) at the same time Marx wrote his comments to Mikhailovsky, and it is very probable that they had discussed the question of freedom and necessity.

Contents

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1

Marx and Russia—Yet an Open Theme

2

The Marx–Mikhailovsky Dispute: Not Only on Empirical Matters, but on Methodology, Too

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Marx’s Theory of Ideology—From Its Enlightenment Roots to Russian Discussions

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Hegel, Engels and the “People Without History”

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Revolutionary Morality and Russian Experiences: Marx, Bakunin and Dostoevsky

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Marx, Nikolai Ziber and Primitive Economy

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7

Marx and Finland—Finland and Marx

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3

Provenience of the Texts

169

Literature

171

Index

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CHAPTER 1

Marx and Russia—Yet an Open Theme

Probably no single modern thinker has had so much influence on the history of Russia as Karl Marx. However, Marx’s relation with Russia is more complex than generally assumed. It could be described as a hate– love relationship. The young and partly yet the middle-aged Marx was, to use an expression today en vogue among the right-wing “patriotic” circles in Russia, almost a russophobe. For him, Russia represented the enemy of progress and democracy, and although lying long away in the East, it exerted its pernicious influence in Western Europe, too. At the same time, this Eastern barbary seems to have fascinated Marx in some way already at this early stage. In the famous opening sentences of the Communist Manifesto, published in the year of the revolution of 1848, Marx described the Roman Pontiff and the Russian Czar as two pillars of reaction, of equal merit, trying to stop the “spectre of Communism”. This was not an unsubstantiated characterisation and did not express only Marx’s (or Engels’) personal opinion. The European radicals of the age generally viewed Russia with a critical eye. Compared with the attitudes in the previous century, a marked change in the Western picture of Russia had taken place. In the Enlightenment period, Russia had been viewed in a more benevolent manner by the European intellectuals. Of course, Russia was a backward country by Western measures, but the matters were constantly improving thanks to such enlightened monarchs as Peter I and © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 V. Oittinen, Marx’s Russian Moment, Marx, Engels, and Marxisms, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-29662-8_1

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Catherine II, and one could expect that some day Russia would be al pari with the West not only in military strength, but even culturally. After the Congress of Vienna (1815) this favourable Enlightenment view on Russia disappeared. The reason was the changed political constellation in the wake of the Restoration. Russian Czar declared himself the warrantor of the post-revolutionary status quo of Europe established in Vienna. Henceforth, especially during the reign of Nicholas I (1825–1855) Russia was to play the role of the leading power of the Holy Alliance. She acted as the “gendarm of Europe”, suffocating radical and democratic movements not only inside Russia herself, but in Europe, too. In 1830–1831, Russian troops crushed the rebellious Poles which had demanded independence, and Poland was deprived of its previous autonomic status; in 1848–1849, the Czar again sent Russian troops outside his empire, now to help the Austrian emperor to suffocate the Hungarian uprising. When one adds to this that since the suppression of the Decabrist uprising in 1825, Russia began quickly to develop into an autocratic police state; that the plans, drafted already during the eighteenth century, to liberate the serfs did not proceed towards realisation; that there was not a glimpse of a free press or of a civil society; that the Czar ordered his censors that the word “progress” should not be used in texts published in Russian—, so one understands well that the Western European radicals had all the reasons to feel an aversion towards Russia and to fear its influence. Despite Marx’s aversion towards the Czarist foreign policy, he had already in the 1840s met Russian radicals living in the West. One of the first acquaintances of this kind was Pavel Annenkov (1812 or 1813– 1887), a Russian nobleman staying at the time near the circles of Herzen and Belinsky, whom Marx met in Brussels in 1846. It is possible that the young Bakunin, with whom Marx in the 1840s yet had a good relationship, presented the two men to each other. Marx seems to have developed some sympathies towards Anennkov, probably because Annenkov had his doubts concerning Pierre-Joseph Proudhon’s utopian socialism, against which Marx already was preparing his pamphlet The Misery of Philosophy (published in 1847). Marx wrote to Annenkov a long letter, where he presented an outline of his new historical and materialistic theory of society, which he just had sketched with Engels in the manuscripts later known as The German Ideology.1 The letter is an important document of Marx’s theoretical development, but it focuses almost entirely on the critique of Proudhon and does not touch upon Russian matters at all.

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Annenkov surely was a polite listener, but he did not share Marx’s views in politics, and their contact remained casual. Why did Marx write such an extensive letter to a person with whom he did not have much in common? A plausible explanation might be that because Annenkov travelled as a journalist writing about his European impressions for the Moscow journal Sovremennik, Marx hoped to get his views presented for Russian readers, too, by this way. If so, the hopes did not become fulfilled, as Annenkov did not mention Marx in his published “Parisian letters”. The long letter on Proudhon was buried in Annenkov’s papers and published only much later in another collection in 1911.2 Despite these casual meetings with Russians abroad, Marx’s views on Russia did not deviate from the general attitude of the European radicals—if then not in that they were, if possible, yet more intensive. The Polish researcher Ewa Borowska speaks even of Marx’s “obsession” with Russia. According to her, it is possible to distinguish two phases in Marx’s attitudes towards Russia, with the years around 1870 as the watershed: The first [period] dates from the articles written for the Neue Rheinishe Zeitung immediately following the defeat of the Spring of Nations in 1848 and ends in 1870. It is the time of Marx’s emphatic hostility toward Russia, which he perceived as the main pillar of European reaction and counterrevolution. His hatred for Russia even turns into obsession: in spite of his materialistic standpoint, he becomes an adherent of the conspiracy theory of history. According to him, Russia is the leader of secret plot aimed against the world revolution.3

Actually, this first, “anti-Russian” period can be divided into two subperiods, before and after the Crimean war (1853–1856). Marx and Engels followed keenly the events in the war theatre writing a great many articles on the military actions and interior politics of the waging parts. As a result, they became increasingly conscious of the decisive influence of international relations on the revolution process. If the war would lead to a collapse of Czarism, it would greatly help the forces of democracy and revolution in the rest of the world. Already in an article published in 1853 in New-York Daily Tribune Marx touched upon the aggravating relations between Western powers (England, France) and Russia. He thought of Russia as an expansionistic Great Power and reminded, how already “more than eight centuries ago, Svyatoslav, the yet Pagan Grand Duke of Russia, declared in an

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assembly of his Boyars that ‘not only Bulgaria, but the Greek Empire in Europe, together with Bohemia and Hungary, ought to undergo the rule of Russia’”.4 The hint of the pan-Slavism of Marx’s own days is here quite clear. In describing the cause of the Crimean war, the struggle between Western powers and Russia about the domination of the Turkish straits, Marx grew eloquent: Constantinople is the eternal city – the Rome of the East […] The struggle between Western Europe and Russia about the possession of Constantinople involves the question whether Byzantinism is to fall before Western civilization, or whether its antagonism shall revive in a more terrible, and conquering form than ever before. Constantinople is the golden bridge thrown between the West and the East, and Western civilization cannot, like the sun, go around the world without passing that bridge; and it cannot pass it without a struggle with Russia […] The Revolution which will break the Rome of the West will also overpower the demoniac influences of the Rome of the East.5

Here, Marx again plays with the image of the dualism and interconnection of “Pope and Czar” mentioned already in the initial sentences of the Communist Manifesto, but now enrichened with the idea of their mutual destruction in the coming revolution. Marx summarised his new insights in one sentence in a letter to Engels on the 13th of December 1859: “Come the next revolution and Russia will oblige by joining in”.6 Now, Russia was no more unambiguously an agent of political reaction somewhere out there in the East, but an important actor in the international arena. However, as Borowska notes, Marx’s “Russophobia persists, and even increases following the defeat of the January uprising in Poland, in 1863”.7 In the aftermath of the Crimean war Marx published his pamphlet Secret Diplomatic History of the Eighteenth Century, a text which Borowska calls “the climax of Marx’s Russophobia”.8 Undeniably, this little pamphlet is one of the most curious texts of what has come down to us from Marx’s pen. Marx had in the library of the British Museum come across some political prints from the eighteenth century, which according to him incontestably proved that the British and Russian governments had during the 1700s plotted for the ruin of the peoples of Europe. The Secret Diplomatic History contains a sketch of the history of Russia (in Chapter IV), where Marx takes part in the so-called “Norman theory”, a claim—later vehemently disputed by patriotic Russians—according to

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which the Russian state was founded by Swedish Vikings. However, continues Marx, soon this “Russia of the Normans completely disappears from the stage”, when the centre of power shifts from Kiev to Moscow. There is an interlude, “the terrible apparition of Genghis Khan”, and so “the bloody mire of Mongolian slavery, not the rude glory of the Norman epoch, forms the cradle of Muscovy, and modern Russia is but a metamorphosis of Muscovy”.9 The “Tartar yoke” left its decisive marks on Russian life, “a yoke not only crushing, but dishonouring and withering the soul of the people”.10 The Grand Dukes of Moscow were originally nothing but humble servants of their Tatar masters, starting from Ivan Kalita, whose “whole system may be expressed in a few words: the machiavelism of the usurping slave”. He managed to persuade the Tatar Khan to grant him the taxation of his subjects in Russia, and created in this way the basis for Muscovy’s future position.11 The new Russian empire of Peter I does not mean any substantial change in the state of matters: It is yet the policy of Peter the Great, and of modern Russia, whatever changes of name, seat, and character the hostile power used may have undergone. Peter the Great is indeed the inventor of modern Russian policy, but he became so only by divesting the old Muscovite method of encroachment of its merely local character and its accidental admixtures, by distilling it into an abstract formula, by generalising its purpose, and exalting its object from the overthrow of certain given limits of power to the aspiration of unlimited power. He metamorphosed Muscovy into modern Russia by the generalisation of its system, not by the mere addition of some provinces.12

The present-day reader of Marx’s pamphlet is struck, not only by its strong bias towards all things Russian, but even by the lack of any attempts to analyse Russia from the viewpoint of historical materialism, the theory Marx and Engels had sketched already a decade ago in the German Ideology manuscripts. Partly this is explained by the fact that Marx’s description of Russia was as such incomplete. It was intended to make up a part of his bigger project of analysing English diplomacy and its effects on the revolutionary movement in Europe. The series of articles against Lord Palmerston, written between October and December 1853 and later published as a separate booklet, was in fact a pendant to the Secret Diplomatic History. But Marx had turned his attention to the significance of international politics already earlier. In the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, summing up the lessons of the 1848 revolution in a

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New Year’s Greetings to the readers, Marx had noted England’s role in Continental affairs: “The liberation of Europe […] depends […] on the successful uprising of the French working class. Every social upheaval in France, however, is bound to be thwarted by the English bourgeoisie, by Great Britain’s industrial and commercial domination of the world […] England will head the counter-revolutionary armies, just as it did during the Napoleonic period”.13 Only four months later, in April 1849, Marx added, in his first article of the series on Wage Labour and Capital, Russia as the second main pillar of the counter-revolution: “Europe, with the defeat of the revolutionary workers, had relapsed into its old double slavery, the Anglo-Russian slavery”.14 The idea of an Anglo-Russian coalition or at least combined action aiming at a suppression of progress and revolution had thus emerged in Marx already during the last years of the 1840s. The Secret Diplomatic History of the Eighteenth Century is one of the least noted works of Marx. Its denunciatory tone towards Russia may explain why it was not taken into the Russian edition of Marx’s and Engels’ collective works, and consequently, not even in the Marx-Engels Werke published in the German Democratic Republic, which followed the editorial principles of the Russian edition.15 Already in 1937 the publication of Marx’s pamphlet in the Russian edition of his works was discussed, and the question was presented to no lesser person than Stalin himself, who discouraged the idea of publishing the text.16 However, a substantial analysis of the work was published in 1918 by David Riazanov, later known as the director of the first MEGA edition and a prominent victim of Stalinism. His study Anglo-russkie otnoshenija v otsenke Karla Marksa (The Anglo-Russian Relations as Evaluated by Karl Marx) was actually written already earlier, in 1908. In the foreword to his book, Riazanov mentions as the motive of his study that the fact of the Russian Revolution of 1905–1907 demands “a critical review of the old program of foreign policy which Social Democracy along with Marx and Engels has inherited from radical democracy”.17 Riazanov does not dispute Marx’s core idea, the diplomatic collaboration between England and Russia, but he has to add many caveats and corrections. In the first instance, Marx had, according to Riazanov, taken too seriously the often repeated claim that Russian society has been substantially formed by the “Tatar yoke”. This is a claim which tries to explain the emergence of Russian autocracy by the results of the Mongol invasion in the thirteenth century. As a consequence, the autocratic state

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would have played a crucial role in Russian history, in a manner which makes Russia something quite different from the West. This claim has been put forth even by many Russian scholars. Riazanov quotes the wellknown historian of culture Petr Miliukov, who had written: “The point in question is that among us, the State has had an immense influence on the organization of the society, whilst in the West the organization of society has brought about the State […] Among us (in Russia) the historical process has gone as if topsy-turvy, from top to down”.18 In reality, however, comments Riazanov, Russian absolutism is a modern phenomenon and related to the correspondent Western European forms. Absolutism is “a tool of economic and political exploitation, and the history of absolutism in Russia reduces, as it does in Western Europe, to the history of struggle of the dominant classes and their fractions for having the possibility to use and apply this powerful weapon to promote their needs”.19 A further defect of Marx’s analysis of Russian autocracy was, according to Riazanov, that he actually views it as some kind of historical constant continuing unchangedly from the olden days on. In fact, the serfdom was consolidated in Russia but in the times of Peter I, and there were substantial differences between the epochs of, say, Ivan IV and Catherine II.20 Marx had in Chapter III of The Secret Diplomatic History analysed—quite shortly—the trade between England and Russia since the beginning of the eighteenth century, but Riazanov insists on a more concrete account of matters. “The inner development of Russia from Peter I to Alexander II was lost from his [Marx’s] sight. He did not note the evolution of Russian absolutism during this period; he overlooked […] the fact that Russia was one of the main colonies of capitalist England in the 16th – eighteenth centuries […] In a word, he overlooked that the commercial subjugation and exploitation of different European nations by the despot of the world market, England, was made possible, among others, only by the help of the despot of Russia”.21 Further, Marx has read, according to Riazanov, too uncritically the eighteenth-century pamphlets he had stumbled upon in the British Library. These documents had, for Marx, “demonstrated unequivocally, that the English statesmen of the eighteenth century were altogether blinded” and did not see the dangers which a too intime liaison with Russia and acknowledgement of its aspirations would create.22 This was hardly the case. It is true that during the Great Northern War (1700– 1721) a coterie of English merchants had a lucrative trade with Russia and

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nothing against that Sweden be squeezed out from its Baltic dominions. But as Riazanov is able to show, at least a couple of the pamphlets warning for the disastrous consequences of an ally with Russia were fabricated by the Swedish diplomat in London, Count Carl Gyllenborg (1679–1746), who was an arch-enemy of Russia and thus not a very reliable or unpartial observer of the diplomatic game of the epoch.23 In other words, the pamphlets Marx was referring to were in reality propaganda with which Gyllenborg tried to influence the public opinion in England towards a more unfavourable attitude concerning Russia. As Riazanov notes, Marx had these views on Russia yet some years later. In Herr Vogt (1860) he wrote about the plans of the Czarist government to abolish the serfdom: Besides, the emancipation of the serfs as the Russian Government sees it, would increase the aggressive power of Russia a hundredfold. It is simply intended to perfect autocratic rule by tearing down the barriers which the big autocrat has hitherto encountered in the shape of the many lesser autocrats of the Russian nobility, whose might is based on serfdom, as well as in the shape of the selfadministrating peasant communes, whose material foundation, common ownership of land, is to be destroyed by the so-called emancipation.24

Riazanov sees in this supercilious comment by Marx an inability to penetrate in a concrete manner into the contradictions of political and economic development of Russia. He notes that “already then, Engels was of other opinion”—in fact, he conjectures that Marx’s just above quoted words contain “a hidden polemics against him [Engels]”.25 This is hardly the case, but as Riazanov notes, Engels had in his brochure Savoy and Nice, published in the same year as Marx’s Herr Vogt (1860) already a more sophisticated view on Russian matters and the just then actual question of the emancipation of serfs. Engels wrote: In the meantime we have obtained an ally in the form of the Russian serfs. The contest that has now broken out in Russia between the ruling and the oppressed classes of the rural population is already undermining the entire system of Russian foreign policy. That system was only possible so long as Russia had no internal political development. But that time is past. Industrial and agricultural development fostered in every way by the government and the nobility, has reached a point where the existing social conditions can no longer be endured. Elimination of these conditions is a

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necessity, on the one hand, but an impossibility without violent change, on the other. With the Russia that existed from Peter the Great to Nicholas, the foreign policy of that Russia collapses as well.26

It proved that Engels had right, comments Riazanov. “He already then quite correctly saw the main cause for the hegemony Russia was exerting in Europe in the basic maxime of Catherine II – to let the other European powers to tear and weaken each other, and equally correctly he pointed to the main cause which would put an end to the unchangeability and durability of the goals of Russia’s foreign policy which hitherto had been her strength – the inner political development of Russia”.27 For Riazanov, it was just Russia’s backwardness, the archaic lack of initiative of its immense peasant population which had lent a stable basis for the operations of the Czarist regime abroad. However, already the Decembrist uprising in St. Petersburg in 1825 on the occasion of Nicholas I’s accession to the throne foreshadowed the changes to come. The outcome of the Crimean War brought to light the incompetence of the Czarist regime and forced the new Emperor Alexander II to carry out reforms, which, however, were altogether insufficient compared to the vastness of the task. In 1875, Engels published in the German Social Democratic journal Der Volksstaat a series of articles, of which the last bore the title Social Relations in Russia. The main occasion for the article was the need to criticise the Blanquist tactics of the Russian revolutionary Petr Tkachev, but it gave in addition to Engels an opportunity to develop further the views he had expressed already in 1860 in Savoy and Nice: Russia undoubtedly is on the eve of a revolution. Her financial affairs are in extreme disorder […] The administration, corrupt from top to bottom as of old, the officials living more from theft, bribery and extortion than on their salaries. The entire agricultural production – by far the most essential for Russia – completely dislocated by the redemption settlement of 1861; the big landowners, without sufficient labour power; the peasants without sufficient land […] The whole held together with great difficulty and only outwardly by an Oriental despotism the arbitrariness of which we in the West simply cannot imagine; a despotism that, from day to day, not only comes into more glaring contradiction with the views of the enlightened classes and, in particular, with those of the rapidly developing bourgeoisie of the capital […]. With all that, a growing recognition among the enlightened strata of the nation concentrated in the capital that this position is

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untenable, that a revolution is impending […], a revolution that, started by the upper classes of the capital, perhaps even by the government itself, must be rapidly carried further, beyond the first constitutional phase, by the peasants […]; a revolution that will be of the greatest importance for the whole of Europe, if only because it will destroy at one blow the last, so far intact, reserve of the entire European reaction.28

As Riazanov notes, Engels had good foresight, although the expected revolutions were to come in 1905 and 1917. He continues with a critical note: “The old scheme for a foreign policy of European democracy which Marx and Engels had made their own – here Western Europe, there an Asiatic Russia; here the Revolution, there the hotbed of European reaction and absolutism – was more and more losing its sense”.29 Russia was changing and the European left had to become aware of the new situation. Undoubtedly, Riazanov’s optimistical views were nurtured by the positive experience of the Russian Revolution of 1905, which changed the geopolitical signatures in the relationship between Russia and the West.

The Turn Around 1870 The real turn in Marx’s views on Russia comes only some years later, around 1870. Several factors can be mentioned which led to this change of attitude. Not a little important was the fact that Russians were the first nation to translate Capital in their own tongue. The Russian edition, translated quickly (after an unsuccessful first attempt by Mikhail Bakunin) by German Lopatin (1845–1918) and Nikolai Danielson (1844–1918), came out from print in 1872, five years after the publication of the German original. The initiative for translation was taken by Danielson, who at once seems to have understood the significance of Capital when the German edition came out in 1867. He had already been active in translating into Russian books of Western social sciences and was constantly monitoring for new ideas emerging in the West. Prior to taking care of the edition of Marx’s Capital , he had organised i.a. the publication of Auguste Comte’s Cours de philosophie positive (6 vols.) in Russian. After Lopatin had to interrupt the work on Marx’s book, Danielson translated the rest. A correspondence between Marx and Danielson emerged, and when the latter heard of Marx’s plans to discuss questions of rent in the coming second volume of Capital , he began to send him Russian materials. In

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a parcel dated 30 September 1869, he dispatched to Marx V. V. BerviFlerovsky’s book Polozhenie rabochego klassa v Rossii (The Condition of the Working Class in Russia).30 “I send to you this book hoping that it will give to you the necessary materials for the next parts of your classical work”.31 Marx was indeed enthusiastic, maybe partly because already Bervi-Flerovsky’s title reminded him of the young Engels’ book on the situation of the English working class. But the most important thing was that Flerovsky showed relying on a vast empirical material how in Russia the same social and economic processes had started leading to the emergence of capitalist production relations which had taken place already some centuries earlier first in England and then in Western Europe. It seems that Flerovsky’s book gave the final incentive for Marx to begin the study of Russian language. In a short letter to Engels on 23 October 1869 he mentions that he had just received a 500-page volume, “unfortunately in Russian”,32 which seems to indicate that he yet then could not read it. About a month later, on 29 November, he writes to Ludwig Kugelmann complaining his work burden, to which adds that he has “to grind at Russian” as a result of a book sent to him.33 Finally, on 10 February 1870 Marx already is able to announce to Engels: “I have read the first 150 pages of Flerovsky’s book”.34 Marx thus managed to obtain by self-study a capacity to read Russian in five months, a not mean accomplishment. He has very positive impression of Flerovsky: “This is the first work to tell the truth about Russian economic conditions”. He adds: The man is a determined enemy of what he calls ‘Russian optimism’. I never held very rosy views about this communist El Dorado, but Flerovsky surpasses all expectations. It is, in fact, rum, and at any event sign of a change, that something like this can be published in Petersburg.35

In a further letter to Engels, written two days later, Marx yet precises why he finds Flerovsky’s book so important and so exciting: His book shows incontestably that the present conditions in Russia are no longer tenable, that the emancipation of the serfs of course only hastened the process of disintegration, and that fearful social revolution is at the door. Here, too, you see the real roots of the schoolboy nihilism that is now the fashion among Russian students, etc. In Geneva, by the by, a

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new colony of exiled Russian students has grown up with a programme proclaiming opposition to pan-Slavism, which should be replaced by the ‘International’.36

These short comments actually give the clue to Marx’s motives in his sudden change of mind concerning Russia and her role in the world affairs. They contain many trains of thought in a compact form and deserve a closer analysis. First, Marx is positively impressed by Flerovsky’s proof that Russia is not a “Communist El Dorado”. He does not mention by name against whom the sting is directed, but from the other comments he has made in the previous years it is obvious that the target is mainly the Russian radical journalist Aleksandr Herzen (1812–1870). Both Marx and Herzen lived in London in exile, but they deliberately avoided meeting each other. One could call Herzen Marx’s bête noire, since his aversion against Herzen remained constant all his life. There were two main reasons why Marx avoided any collaboration with him. The first was that Herzen’s concept of socialism was for Marx only one of those utopian variants which disoriented the working class. As the present-day Russian scholars Valentina Tvardovskaya and Boris Itenberg write: Herzen’s socialism departed ‘from the soil, from the peasant life’, ‘from ownership and mangement of the soil by the community’. Herzen linked the future of his country with a class, which for the Marxists was historically outdated, without perspectives […] Herzen’s deliberations about how the way of life of the Russian peasantry comes better up to the ideals which Europe is cherishing than ‘the institutions of the civilized Germano-Roman world’ would necessarily sound for the leaders of the proletarian movement as an utopia – a reactionary and noxious utopia.37

But besides these theoretical differences, there was an additional and probably even more weighty reason for Marx’s antipathy towards Herzen. Marx suspected him of being an agent of Pan-Slavism, an ideology which preached the unity of all Slavic people in Europe and which the Czarist diplomacy tried to use as its tool for counter-revolutionary purposes. Marx commented on the book of Flerovsky yet from a further viewpoint in a letter which he sent to his daughter Laura and his son-in-law Paul Lafargue:

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The book of Flerovski on ‘the situation of the labouring classes in Russia’, is an extraordinary book. I am really glad to be now able to read it somewhat fluently with the aid of a dictionary. This is the first time that the whole economical state of Russia has been revealed. It is conscientious work […] The author […] harbours of course some delusions about la perfectibilité perfectible de la Nation Russe, et le principe providentiel de la propriété communale dans sa forme Russe. But let that pass. After the study of his work, one feels deeply convinced that a most terrible social revolution – in such inferior forms of course as suit the present Muscovite state of development – is irrepressible in Russia and near at hand. This is good news. Russia and England are the two great pillars of the present European system.38

Here Marx repeats his old idea of a secret union between England and Russia, presented already in the Revelations… of 1856–1857, but the horizon is now expanded and the prospect of an imminent revolution in Russia, which will crush the received system of international relations, has now emerged. While Herzen belonged, like Bakunin and many other older Russian radicals, to the generation which had emigrated to the West during the years of the reign of Nicholas I already in the 1840s, the “new colony of exiled Russian students” Marx mentions in his above cited letter to Engels of 12 February 1870, represented a second generation of political emigration. This “emigration of the 1860s” had different experiences and was heavily influenced by the ideas of Nikolai Chernyshevsky, one of the founding figures of the Narodniks and a “revolutionary democrat”, as he was called in the Soviet historiography. The émigré generation of the 1860s had less illusions concerning the perspectives of Russia than the people of the 1840s. Above all, they had grown critical about the utopian traits and inconsequences in the ideas of such men of the previous emigration as Bakunin or Herzen. As the Soviet historian Boris Kozmin writes, this “young emigration” [of the 1860s] generally detested the autocracy and the remnants of serfdom; it adored Chernyshevsky, contempted the “liberals” and had an openly skeptical attitude towards the older emigration which had come mainly from the circles of nobility […] The emigrant youth remembered well Herzen’s wavering between democratism and liberalism in the years preceding the reform of 1861. They accused him of preferring a peaceful way of reforms instead of a revolutionary one and

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thus hoping that it might be possible to persuade the czarist regime of the inevitability of radical reforms […] The polemics which Chernyshevsky and Dobroljubov had to have with Kolokol [Herzen’s journal] was yet fresh in the memory of the young emigrants.39

From the second emigrant wave of the 1860s, the Russian section of the First International soon emerged. One of the key persons in this development was Aleksandr Serno-Solovyovich (1838–1869). In Russia, he had participated in the activities of Narodnaya volya and run a book shop in St. Petersburg, where revolutionary youth had its meetings, but in 1862 he had to leave his native country for Switzerland. Here he met Bakunin, who in 1867 returned to Switzerland from Italy and got not a favourable impression of him. Serno-Solovyovich sent to Samuel Borkheim a characteristic of Bakunin, who in turn forwarded the information to Marx. Marx was so impressed that in December 1867 he sent to Serno-Solovyovich a copy of Capital which was just then published. “One has to think, that Serno-Solovyovich was the only Russian, who got from Marx such a present”, says Kozmin.40 Serno-Solovyovich replied to Marx only almost a year later, on 20 November 1868. He wrote that the worker’s movement was on the rise thanks to the International, but at the same time the International suffers from a lack of a clear idea, which may soon lead to its downfall. For this reason, Serno-Solovyovich asked Marx to contribute on a weekly basis the journal of the Romanic federation Égalité with theoretical articles.41 The journal project did not come to fulfilment due to the fact that the Bakunists managed to keep their positions in Switzerland. The political struggle was too exhausting for Serno-Solovyovich who finally ended with suicide in August 1869. But already in the next Spring the comrades of Serno-Solovyovich had organised themselves as the Russian section of the International, and asked in a letter to Marx from 12 March 1870 to be their representant in the General Council of the International in London. The letter is a most interesting document. The Russian revolutionaries stress that they are “educated in the spirit of our teacher Chernyshevsky”, exiled to Siberia in 1864. “With joy”, continues the letter, “we have greeted your exposition of the socialist principles and your critique of the system of industrial feodalism”. But the passage which must especially have attached Marx’s interest, stood already on the first page of the letter: “However, we have yet another task: to unmask the Panslavism and

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engage the youth of the Slavic countries to fight against those old ideas which serve only the Czarist Empire…”.42 Marx, of course, replied positively. “I am pleased to accept your proposal to take on the honourable duty of being your representative on the General Council”, he wrote in the letter which informed the Russian section that they were “immediately admitted” into the International. He then mentioned that he had read Flerovsky’s book, which is “a real eyeopener for Europe”, exposing “mercilessly” the “Russian optimism which is spread over the Continent even by the so-called revolutionaries”. The last sentence of the letter reads: “Such works as Flerovsky’s and those of your teacher Chernyshevsky do real honour to Russia and prove that your country is also beginning to take part in the movement of our age”.43 The young exiled Russian radicals, with whom Marx now had come in contact, differed markedly from the older emigration (Herzen, Bakunin et al.), of which Marx had negative experiences. Indeed, they had a certain resemblance with the “new men”, the emergence of which Chernyshevsky had predicted in his novel What Is To Be Done (1863) in the figure of Rakhmetov. It is possible that Marx had heard the name of Chernyshevsky already in the early 1860s,44 but in earnest he noted him after he had become familiar with the writings of Serno-Solovëvich—or rather, as he could not yet read Russian, had received information of their content from Sigismund Borkheim (1826–1885), a German left journalist, with whom he stood in friendly terms. In a letter to J. Ph. Becker on 2 August 1870 Marx asks whether he could help him to get the fourth volume of Chernyshevsky’s works just then published.45 In May 1871 Danielson sent to Marx two issues of the journal Sovremennik from 1857, where Chernyshevsky’s article O pozemel’noj sobstvennosti (On Land Ownership) were published, and in December 1872 Marx wrote to Danielson, that “I would like to publish something on Chernyshevsky’s life and personality, etc., so as to create some interest in him in the West”.46 This plan did not realise, but Chernyshevsky made a big impression on Marx and influenced profoundly his views on Russia. In 1871, he read Chernyshevsky’s analysis of John Stuart Mill, which had such an effect on him that he mentioned the work in the afterword to the second German edition of Capital . Here Marx praises Chernyshevsky’s evaluation of the English liberal economist: Mill’s “shallow syncretism” is nothing but a “declaration of bankruptcy by bourgeois economy, an event on which the great Russian scholar and critic, N. Tschernyschewsky, has thrown the

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light of a master mind in his Outlines of Political Economy according to Mill ”.47 Marx wanted to get more information about Chernyshevsky, and Danielson, always keen to furnish him with new Russian materials, sent in Summer 1872 to London some Russian reviews of Capital and Chernyshevsky’s manuscript Pis’ma bez adresa (Unadressed Letters, 1862), asking for Marx’s help in finding a publisher for it in the West. In this work, Chernyshevsky tried to evaluate the significance and consequences of the abolition of serfdom in 1861 for Russia’s future. Marx took notes and even translated for his own use some passages of it into English,48 until Lavrov managed to publish the whole work in Zürich in 1874. A closer evaluation of it by Marx has not survived, but it seems that Marx was taken by Chernyshevsky’s sober analysis of the illusions of Russian liberals who thought that it would be possible to persuade the Czar and the Czarist regime on the necessity of democratic reforms. The leitmotif of Chernyshevsky’s work was, on the contrary, that the option of a “peaceful opposition” was already lost and the only way to go forward was a regime change.49 No wonder that David Riazanov called Chernyshevsky “five or ten minutes less than a Marxist” and estimated, that measured in the chronology of Marx’s and Engels’ development, he “remained on the level of The Holy Family”50 (first joint book of Marx and Engels, published in 1844 and not yet containing the core ideas on historical materialism which were to come a year later in The German Ideology). However, although Marx almost “fell in love” with Chernyshevsky, important differences between their thought remained. Marx rarely refers to Chernyshevsky after the first years of the 1870s, and one reason for this cooling down of the initial enthusiasm may indeed be, as the Russian scholars Valentina Tvardovskaya and Boris Itenberg suggest, that he grew more conscious of such elements in Chernyshevsky’s world outlook which did not rhyme with his own views. We can sum the differences up in philosophical and political ones. In philosophy, Chernyshevsky remained a Feuerbachian, that is, he subscribed to the anthropological materialism of Feuerbach. Marx, in turn, had already in the mid-1840s rejected Feuerbach’s individualistic view on Man which had prevented him to understand the deeply social essence of human life. The individualistic anthropological perspective narrowed Chernyshevsky’s analyses of the social development. As Tvardovskaya and Itenberg note, Chernyshevsky saw the main elements of social progress in work and enlightenment, while Marx gave prominence to the development of productive forces

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of the society.51 In addition, Chernyshevsky seems to have had a rather superficial idea of Hegel’s dialectical method (even here, he remained a Feuerbachian!). According to him, all the dialectics is about is that the thinker must not rest content with any positive deduction, but must find out whether the object he is thinking about contains qualities and forces the opposite of those which the objects had presented to him at the first sight […] In reality […], everything depends upon circumstances […], i. e. a definite judgement can be pronounced only […] after examining all the circumstances on which it depends.52

For Chernyshevsky, the idea of dialectics boiled in the last instance down to a demand of a scrupulous and concrete analysis of a concrete situation.53 It is true that already Hegel stressed the concrete character of dialectics in contrast to the abstract schemes of the intellect (the Verstand), but this characterisation is not enough. Empiricism, too, claims to be concrete, since it clings to singular facts. For Hegel, dialectics consisted of a “negative self-relation”, the model of which was the selfconscious subjectivity and whose movement was constituted by the rule of the negation. Only this self-referentiality makes possible the idea of a concrete totality, where all singular facts are seen as organic members of a greater whole. It is not an exaggeration to say that the Hegel reception of Chernyshevsky—and of the Narodniks generally—remained at a rather superficial level. In politics, the main difference between Marx and Chernyshevsky was that for the latter, the main force in creating a socialist society of the future was the peasantry, not the proletariat. The role of industrial production remained obscure in his thought. Chernyshevsky does not seem to have at all posed the question of productive forces in the same sense as Marx. It is true that Chernyshevsky saw the historically transient character of bourgeois production relations, but this insight was based more on a general, “philosophical” analysis of the capitalist form of production than on a detailed study of the categories of political economy. It was essentially a result of the “Russian gaze” on Western Europe, which at once and intuitively made clear the differences between Russia and the West and prompted reflexions concerning Russia’s choices. Chernyshevsky had important ideas on Russia’s chances to avoid capitalism, to which we shall return soon below.

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Chernyshevsky was the starting point of a new direction in the Russian liberation movement, a direction which usually has been called Narodniks (from Russian národ, ‘people’).54 It was a movement which often has been characterised as “peasant socialism”. Narodnism was a specifically Russian phenomenon with no exact parallels in the West. However, some socio-economic and ideological similarities with twentieth-century radical Third World movements especially in Latin America may be pointed out—in fact, one can defend the thesis that Narodnism was a precursor of many non-European radical and anticolonial movements to come in the next century. Already as such, it would be worthy of more intense research than hitherto. Nikolai Troitsky, a present-day Russian historian of Narodnism, acknowledges the received definition of it (backed i.a. by Lenin) as a revolutionary movement defending the interests of peasants, but adds that in the ideology of the Narodniks the idea of common ownership of land, based on the old Russian obshchina (the village community) institution, played a central role. Further, according to Troitsky one should not forget that in practice the Narodnik movement was upheld by radical intellectuals which came from the so-called raznochinets intelligentsia,55 not so much by the illiterate peasants themselves.56 Chernyshevsky and his followers represented the radical current in Narodnism, but there were other tendencies, too. Piotr Lavrov (1823–1900), a member of the International and participant of the Paris Commune, who met Marx in 1871, was, together with Nikolai Mikhailovsky, a representant of so-called “subjective sociology”. This was a social theory which, departing from Comte’s positivism, viewed the society, as Lavrov put it in his Istoricheskie pis’ma (Letters on History, 1868–69), as “an abstraction, which, as abstraction, does not have any justification for me, a real Being,”. In “its real content”, the society “resolves itself into persons”.57 No comments of Marx on these ideas of his Russian acquaintance have been preserved, but it is at the outset clear that he could not have shared them. Soon, Lavrov’s and Marx’s relations became cooler, but not because of purely theoretical disagreements. When Marx and Engels began their struggle against Bakunin’s influence in the International, Lavrov thought of it as unnecessary squabble on minute matters.58 To sum up the reasons for Marx’s “Russian turn” around 1870, we can enumerate at least three of them: (1) Marx’s acquaintance with Flerovsky and other Russian writers, whose work showed that Russia, too, was turning to the path of capitalist development; (2) his coming to know the works of Chernyshevsky and his followers (Serno-Solovyovich and others)

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which offered a much more realistic analysis of Russia’s intern situation than the illusions of Herzen and Bakunin; and (3) the Russian translation of Capital , published in 1872. It is important to see that Marx’s attitude to Russia was founded on the interplay of different levels of analysis. He was not only interested in Russia’s economic development towards capitalism and the respective decline of the obshchina, the peasant’s communities after the abolition of serfdom in 1861; the political consequences of this development were for him equally important, and to boot, in two respects: first, since the Czarist autocracy was, as Chernyshevsky had shown, a political form created to ensure a production system based on exploitation of serfs, it was futile to hope for a reformation of the regime. A revolutionary way for the solution of the aggravating contradictions was much more probable. But secondly, such a turn of matters would have far-reaching international consequences, too, due to Russia’s important position in the system of world politics. Above all, it would lead to a break of the Anglo-Russian alliance which in the opinion of Marx had to a large extent been responsible for the failure of the European Revolution of 1848. So a coming revolution in Russia, whatever its political character might be, would immensely favour the European revolutionary movement. This complex situation added yet a third level to Marx’s relations with Russia. He developed a “diplomatic” attitude to his new Russian acquaintances of the “1860’s generation”, the Narodniks. It is indeed striking how polite his communication with such Russian revolutionaries as Nikolai Utin, Danielson (translators of Capital ) or Piotr Lavrov was compared with the way he had straightened out the matters with European socialists. While he had mercilessly crushed such men as Wilhelm Weitling or Proudhon for their utopistic sketches for a future society, or demonstratively avoided to meet Herzen who lived like him in exile in London, he never explicitly criticised his new Russian correspondents for similar utopism as regards the possibilities of building socialism on the basis of the obshchina. He did not try to get involved with the internal disputes of the new generation of Russian revolutionaries, but remained more or less an outside observer and showed his scepticism only in notes for himself and in letters to his intimate friend Engels. The reasons for this conduct were clear enough. In no case should the relations of European socialists to the Russian revolutionary movement become jeopardised. Further, as the creation of the Russian section of the

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International showed, it seemed that the Russians could very well themselves draw the correct conclusions from the situation in their country and get rid of utopian elements in their thought without advice from the outside. This did not mean that Marx should have again lost his interest towards Russia after the first enthusiasm around 1870 became more moderate in the subsequent years. On the contrary, during the 1870s, he accumulated an overwhelming amount of empirical material on economic development of Russia, in the first instance on the agrarian relations. He was assisted here above all by Danielson, who continuously sent him statistics from official publications of Russian state committees. His intention was to use this material in the second and third volumes of Capital , especially in the final volume, where he planned to deal with the question of rent and thus complete his analysis of the three sources of revenue. But the job did not become finished, for several reasons. When his friends grew impatient, Marx had to recur to all kinds of explanations. On 10 April 1879 he sent to faithful Danielson a long letter, where he first gave an account of the state of health of his wife Jenny, and continued then to the causes of delay of Volume II of Capital : Firstly: I should under no circumstances have published the second volume before the present English industrial crisis had reached its climax. The phenomena are this time singular, in many respects different from what they were in the past […] Secondly: The bulk of materials I have received not only from Russia, but from the United States, etc., make it pleasant for me to have a ‘pretext’ of continuing my studies, instead of winding them up finally for the public. Thirdly: My medical adviser has warned me to shorten considerably my ‘working-day’ if I were not desirous to relapse into the state of 1874 and the following years where I got giddy and unable to proceed after a few hours of serious application.59

Although the study of the economies of the United States and Russia was according to Marx the cause for his delay in finishing Capital , he nevertheless thinks that some general conclusions can already be made. While in the United States “the concentration of capital and the gradual expropriation of the masses is not only the vehicle, but also the natural

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offspring (though artificially accelerated by the Civil War) of an unprecedented rapid industrial development, agricultural progress, etc.”, Russia offers a picture of quite another character: [it] reminds you rather of the times of Louis XIV and Louis XV, where the financial, commercial, industrial superstructure, or rather the façade of the social edifice, looked (although they had a much more solid foundation than in Russia) like a satire upon the stagnant state of the bulk of production (the agricultural one) and the famine of the producers.60

From the comment, short as it is, it becomes clear that Marx expected in Russia a revolution like that in France in 1789–1794, not a proletarian one. This may be one additional reason why he did not try to pilot the Russian revolutionaries he met towards scientific socialism. They did not represent a proletarian movement, rather they might be compared with the Jacobins. Even the terrorist methods of the combat organisation Narodnaya Volya, which was initiated by those Narodniks who had lost their faith in the possibility of a peaceful solution, could be compared with the French Jacobins of the previous century; their terror was, as Marx had formulated already in 1848, “nothing but a plebeian way of dealing with the enemies of the bourgeoisie, absolutism, feudalism and parochialism”.61

Unsent Letters in 1877 and 1881 Next important encounter with Russia Marx had been in 1877 and 1881. In both cases, the question was whether Russia might “leap” over the capitalist stage of development. The Russian peasant community, the obshchina, had preserved collective ownership of the village on land. This peculiar trait of Russian life had served both for the Slavophiles and the Narodniks as an argument against introducing capitalist production relations into Russia. These arguments were well known to Marx already before his 1870 turn in views on Russia. They formed the base of Herzen’s ideas about Russian socialism and were thus regarded by Marx as Pan-Slavist propaganda. Hence the scornful and sudden attack in the final rows of Chapter 23 of the first German edition of Capital (1867) against “the half-Russian and entire Moscovite Herzen”, who had prophesied “the renovation of Europe by the knout and by obligate infusion of Kalmuk blood”. Yet worse, if possible was that Herzen had copied his ideas of “Russian” Communism from Haxthausen, a Prussian who had

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found these primitive forms of economy among the Germans. It is in this context Marx spoke of Russia with disdain as a “Communist Eldorado” in his above quoted letter to Engels of 10 February 1870. And even reading Bervi-Flerovsky, who otherwise had done such a big positive impact on him, Marx noted—in the letter to Laura and Paul Lafargue in March 1870—ironically Flerovsky’s illusions on “le principe providentiel de la propriété communale dans sa forme Russe”. Thus, until around 1870 Marx had vehemently rejected the claim that there was in Russian peasant life something one could see as a basis for a future “communism”. He connected this idea with Pan-Slavist aspirations. It seems that reading Chernyshevsky’s works moved Marx to mitigate his initial sharply negative attitude concerning the Russian obshchina. Marx did not write on these matters explicitly, but his marginal notes to books of Chernyshevsky allow this conclusion. Already in 1929, when Marx’s notes to several works of Chernyshevsky were published for the first time in Arkhiv Marksa i Engel’sa, the editors remarked that Marx’s underlinings gave the impression that he was interested above all “in Chernyshevsky’s agrumentation in favour of the obshchina”: Marx’s attention was especially drawn by Chernyshevsky’s attempt (in the article Kritika filosofskikh predubezhdenij protiv obshchiny) to connect his hopes on the obshchina as a potential starting point of a socialist reshaping of society with the philosophical scheme of Hegel. Marx has underlined all the main points of this argumentation. It is obvious that he follows with interest Chernyshevsky’s train of thought. And the axiom which Chernyshevsky puts as the ground of his deliberations: “in its form, the highest level is similar with the beginning, from which it emerges” is underlined by Marx twice. He noted even the proviso by which Chernyshevsky rejected the misinterpretations of this axiom: “It goes without saying, that although the form is similar, the content is at the end incommensurably more rich and higher than in the beginning”.62

Since we do not have Marx’s own words but only underlinings scrabbled in the books and articles he had read, the conclusion that Marx changed his mind (or at least mitigated his initially too severe verdict) after having read Chernyshevsky remains of course conjectural. However, there are good reasons to think that Marx’s mind indeed changed in the important subject concerning the significance of the obshchina. He did not any more dismiss it as some kind of an antediluvian remnant only which would be irrelevant when discussing the prospects of socialism. A sign

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of Marx’s change of mind is that he removed the insulting remark on Herzen and “Russian Communism” from the second German edition of Capital (1872) and from the French edition which soon followed it. Chernyshevsky’s article Kritika filosofskikh predubezhdenij protiv obshchiny (A Critique of Philosophical Prejudices Against the Obshchina) which Marx had read was published in the journal Sovremennik already in 1858. It was a continuation of polemics on Russia’s economic future which Chernyshevsky had begun in the previous year against the liberals who had recommended that Russia should choose the same path of development as the West. The question of landownership was a central one, since in Russia there did not exist a private property on land in the modern sense. According to Chernyshevsky, this situation should be seen as a positive chance, not as a drawback, since it contained the option of another, more democratic society than in the West. Interestingly, however, Chernyshevsky chose to defend his point of view not with empirical, but philosophical arguments. He refers to Schelling and Hegel—noting at the same time that he is not the follower of either of them—who had, according to him, done a great service to science by having found the “general forms, in which the process of evolution proceeds”.63 However, the question is, “must a social phenomenon in the real life of every society go through all the logical moments, or might it, in favourable circumstances, move from the first or second stage of development directly to the fifth or sixth stage, jumping over the middle stages, as it happens in the phenomena of individual life and in processes of physical nature?”.64 Chernyshevsky is here discussing the possibility of saving the Russian obshchina, the common ownership of land, from peril by jumping over the capitalist phase of development. In the Soviet literature, this Chernyshevskian idea of the “leap” was usually seen as an application of Hegel’s dialectics.65 However, Chernyshevsky’s knowledge of Hegel is, as already noted, not very deep—at times, he does not even seem to bother to distinguish between Schelling and Hegel—and as to dialectics, he gives a strange justification to his thesis of the “leap”: According to Hegel […] the middle logical moments often do not attain the objective being and remain as logical moments only. It is enough that a certain intermediate moment reaches the being somewhere and in some time; by this the process of evolution in all other times and localities becomes relieved from the necessity to bring about its actual realization, as Hegel plainly says.66

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Chernyshevsky does not tell us where Hegel should have made a claim like this. It is obvious that he is ascribing to Hegel his own idea of the possibility of a leap in a logical process, in order to justify the thesis that the obshchina can be “saved” in a higher social formation. In other words, Chernyshevsky revolts here against the logical necessity of a Hegelian dialectical process and invents a justification for a leap in the chain of logical moments. We encounter here the same problem, or rather antinomy, of determinism and free choice, with whom the Narodniks generally struggled when they discussed Russia’s future. The “subjective sociology” of Lavrov and Mikhailovsky was a more developed version of this attempt to get a hold on the laws of history. We do not know what Marx thought about Chernyshevsky’s peculiar philosophical justification of a leap in the chain of development. But in his 1877 letter to the editors of the journal Otechestvennye zapiski he had to take a position just on this question. Nikolai Mikhailovsky had in his review of Marx’s ideas asked, whether Russia really must go through a stage of primitive accumulation as described in Chapter 23 of Marx’s Capital , or might it avoid it. I will analyse Marx’s comments to Mikhailovsky more extensively in a separate essay in this book, so it suffices here to note, that Marx now has a more favourable view on the prospects of the obshchina than earlier, and he explicitly mentions Chernyshevsky as the reason for this: In his remarkable articles this writer [Chernyshevsky] has dealt with the question whether, as her liberal economists maintain, Russia must begin by destroying la commune rurale [the village commune] in order to pass to the capitalist regime, or whether, on the contrary, she can without experiencing the tortures of this regime appropriate all its fruits by developing ses propres donnees historiques [the particular historic conditions already given her]. He pronounces in favour of this latter solution. And my honourable critic [Mikhailovsky] would have had at least as much reason for inferring from my consideration for this “great Russian critic and man of learning” that I shared his views on the question, as for concluding from my polemic against the “literary man” and Pan-Slavist [Herzen] that I rejected them.67

Marx continues, noting, first that “I have arrived at this result: if Russia continues along the path it has followed since 1861, it will miss the finest chance that history has ever offered to a nation, only to undergo all the fatal vicissitudes of the capitalist system”. So far he agrees with Chernyshevsky and the Narodniks. There indeed exists a chance to

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avoid the capitalist path of development. However, Marx’s judgement remains Solomonic, because the question on the possibilities opened by the obshchina can be solved only by an analysis of the concrete circumstances. As Marx concludes his letter, the key to understand the processes “will never be arrived at by employing the all-purpose formula of a general historico-philosophical theory whose supreme virtue consists in being supra-historical”.68 One can interpret these lines as a critique of Chernyshevsky’s attempt to deduce the possibility of a developmental leap in general “laws” of evolution. In his important book Nashi raznoglasija (Our Differences), published in Russian in Genève in 1884, which was the first detailed vindication of Marxist realism against Narodnik utopism in the Russian revolutionary movement, Grigori Plekhanov noted the same problems concerning Chernyshevsky as Marx, but makes yet additional comments. Although Chernyshevsky’s Kritika filosofskikh predubezhdenij “was and still is the most brilliant attempt made in our literature to apply dialectics to the analysis of social phenomena”, he and his followers drew “far more sweeping conclusions than the character of the premises warranted”. In fact, “the solution which Chernyshevsky found for the question of the commune’s destiny was in substance purely algebraic; and it could not be otherwise, because he opposed it to the purely algebraic formulae of his opponents”.69 Plekhanov criticises here Chernyshevsky’s strange idea of a “leap” in the chain of dialectics. According to him, Chernyshevsky had thought that the historical interval between primitive communism and the future high-organised communist society can be expressed in an algebraic language as a x. This x then gets different values for countries in different situations. In Russia’s case, the x could be equalled to nought. “It was in this way”, continues Plekhanov, “that the abstract possibility of the primitive commune passing immediately into a ‘higher, communist form’ was proved”. But precisely because this kind of “philosophico-historical dialectics” was equally applicable to all countries, it had no use for realistic forecasts of social development.70 One can agree with Plekhanov’s comments. Last time Marx had to deal more intensively with Russian matters comes two years before his death, in 1881. Vera Zasulich, a Russian revolutionary living in exile in Genève, contacted Marx on behalf of her

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comrades. The motive for her letter was a discussion among the Narodniks, where the arguments defending the possibility of a Russian Sonderentwicklung and perspectives for a democracy based on peasant communities which had figured already in Mikhailovsky’s writings, again surged up. Even the forum was the same, the journal Otechestvennye Zapiski. This time it was a certain Vasily Vorontsov,71 who like Mikhailovsky argued that there was no capitalism in Russia. Zasulich asked Marx for comments on these claims, as they had given rise to differences of opinion among the Narodniks. Thanks to the materials with whom especially Danielson had procured him, Marx was exceedingly well versed in questions of Russian agriculture and economy. But despite the fact that he in principle was quite prepared to answer Zasulich’s letter, he had difficulties in formulating the answer. He wrote three sketches, but only the fourth, the most laconic of them, succeeded and it was this version he sent to Zasulich on 8 March 1881. In this letter, Marx first apologises for a “nervous complaint” which has prevented him to answer sooner. He then quotes the characterisation of capitalist mode of production he gave in the French edition of Capital . At the core of capitalism “lies the complete separation of the producer from the means of production”: ... the basis of this whole development is the expropriation of the agricultural producer. To date this has not been accomplished in a radical fashion anywhere except in England […] But all the other countries of Western Europe are undergoing the same process.72

In other words, Marx continues, “the ‘historical inevitability’ of this process is expressly limited to the countries of Western Europe”. Why so? Because the historical genesis of capitalism is a process, where—now Marx is again quoting from Capital —“private property, based on personal labour […] will be supplanted by capitalist private property, based on the exploitation of the labour of others, on wage labour”.73 Thus, the birth of capitalism means a change in the form of private property: the peasants lose their previous personal property, their land and houses, and become free wage labourers who do not possess anything else but their labour force and consequently have no other choice but to work for the capitalist. The situation in Russia is, however, different. In Russia, there has never been private property on land, but the peasants have owned it collectively.

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When Russian capitalism will emerge, their “their communal property would, on the contrary, have to be transformed into private property”.74 After these remarks, Marx gives his final assessment: Hence the analysis provided in Capital does not adduce reasons either for or against the viability of the rural commune, but the special study I have made of it, and the material for which I drew from original sources, has convinced me that this commune is the fulcrum of social regeneration in Russia, but in order that it may function as such, it would first be necessary to eliminate the deleterious influences which are assailing it from all sides, and then ensure for it the normal conditions of spontaneous development. I have the honour to be, dear Citizen, Yours very faithfully, Karl Marx 75

What, however, is interesting is that in the letter drafts Marx chose not to send he was much more optimistic. In the first—and longest—draft he asked, why the communal property was able to escape in Russia the fate of disappearing with increasing social progress, and answered the question by himself: I reply: because in Russia, thanks to a unique combination of circumstances, the rural commune, still established on a nationwide scale, may gradually detach itself from its primitive features and develop directly as an element of collective production on a nationwide scale. It is precisely thanks to its contemporaneity with capitalist production that it may appropriate the latter’s positive acquisitions without experiencing all its frightful misfortunes. Russia does not live in isolation from the modern world; neither is it the prey of a foreign invader like the East Indies.76

Marx thus notes that precisely because the more archaic collective ownership of land exists in Russia simultaneously with the advanced capitalist form of production, it can adopt its “positive acquisitions” of the latter without experiencing its misfortunes. This is the same idea which Chernyshevsky had, but a significant difference is that Marx does not try to prove its possibility by speculations about jumping over the intermediate

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moments in a logico-dialectical scheme. Instead, he stresses, that only an analysis of the real circumstances can give an answer: Theoretically speaking, then, the Russian “rural commune” can preserve itself by developing its basis, the common ownership of land, and by eliminating the principle of private property which it also implies; it can become a direct point of departure for the economic system towards which modern society tends; it can turn over a new leaf without beginning by committing suicide […]. But we must descend from pure theory to the Russian reality.77

In the same first draft Marx makes en passant a comment, whose significance seems to have escaped most scholars who have dealt with Marx’s analyses of Russia: The best proof that this development of the “rural commune” is in keeping with the historical trend of our age is the fatal crisis which capitalist production has undergone in the European and American countries where it has reached its highest peak, a crisis that will end in its destruction, in the return of modern society to a higher form of the most archaic type – collective production and appropriation.78

Marx clearly thinks that the “window of opportunity” or kairos for the Russian peasant community will not last long. The crisis and destruction of capitalist system is the prerequisite for the obshchina to succeed in forming the basis of the new society. It is of course impossible to say today, how soon Marx expected the revolution to take place, but the scope could hardly have been longer than one or two decades. After that, the chances offered by the obshchina would be lost. Interestingly, here Marx reverts to a dialectical figure of the negation of negation: the “most archaic type” of society will return to a higher form. This is a direct allusion to Chernyshevsky’s formulation in Kritika filosofskikh predubezhdenij… which we quoted already above: “in its form, the highest level is similar with the beginning, from which it emerges”, a formulation which Marx had underlined twice in his own copy of Chernyshevsky. But unlike Chernyshevsky, Marx does not try to prove the chances of the obshchina by appealing to laws of dialectics. Rather, he uses the figure of Hegelian negation of negation as an illustration only, as an exposition of the results already found by a foregoing analysis.

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A similar, but not as clearly formulated, “dialectical” idea of development Marx had found in Lewis Henry Morgan’s Ancient Society (1877), a groundbreaking study of primitive societies which Marx was reading and conspecting at the same time (about December 1880 to June 1881)79 as he wrote to Zasulich. In the first draft to Zasulich Marx quotes from the book of Morgan, speaking of “the return of modern [i.e. capitalist] societies to the ‘archaic’ type of communal property” as a result of the breakdown of bourgeois form of production. This new, post-capitalist society will be, in the words of Morgan, “a revival in a superior form of an archaic social type”.80 Marx thus looks for analyses of archaic, precapitalist societies both in Chernyshevsky and in ethnography, especially in Morgan. In both he finds the same dialectical idea: the return of “primitive communism” in a post-capitalist society, but in a higher, sublated form. This is a Hegelian Aufhebung, but at the same time it is obvious that Marx uses it in a figurative sense, as a form of presentation in which the results of scientific analysis can be clad. When one compares the optimism of the first draft to the final letter which Marx actually sent to Zasulich, it is conspicuous how he grows more and more sceptical as the drafts follow each other. He circles the theme of Russian obshchina like a cat around a hot porridge and finds more and more reservations with which he surrounds his initial vision. A little later, the foreword to the second Russian edition of the Communist Manifesto which was signed together by Marx and Engels (it is dated 21 December 1882 and one of the last texts from Marx’s pen), summarises: Now the question is: can the Russian obshchina, a form of primeval common ownership of land, even if greatly undermined, pass directly to the higher form of communist common ownership? Or must it, conversely, first pass through the same process of dissolution as constitutes the historical development of the West? The only answer possible today is this: If the Russian Revolution becomes the signal for a proletarian revolution in the West, so that the two complement each other, the present Russian common ownership of land may serve as the starting point for communist development.81

Marx had famously in the Capital (1867) declared, that the capitalist mode of appropriation, the result of the capitalist mode of production, produces capitalist private property. This is the first negation of individual private property, as founded on the labour of the proprietor.

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But capitalist production begets, with the inexorability of a law of Nature, its own negation. It is the negation of negation. This does not re-establish private property for the producer, but gives him individual property based on the acquisitions of the capitalist era: i.e., on co-operation and the possession in common of the land and of the means of production.82

In the case of Russia, he does not any more speak of an “inexorability of a law of Nature”, which would follow the steps of Hegelian dialectics. The dialectical, triadic scheme—that a higher form of society will re-establish some main traits of the primitive community—remains, but not as a “law” which all phenomena should obey. Which status, then, does the dialectics have in the description of a historical process? In this context, Marx does not deal in depth with the question, but a clue can be found in the afterword to the second German edition of Capital , dated January 1873. Here, he refers to the critique of the “Hegelianism” in the first issue of Capital which he had received especially in Russia. But instead of answering with his own words to the critique, he quotes at length the reviewer, I. I. Kaufman, who was a professor in St. Petersburg. Kaufman’s review was published in the Otechestvennye Zapiski in 1872 and Marx had obtained a copy of it through the indefatigable Danielson. Marx approves Kaufman’s description of his method as “infinitely more realistic than [of] all his fore-runners in the work of economic criticism”, although Kaufman did not like the “German-dialectical” manner of presentation. Marx then concludes: Of course the method of presentation must differ in form from that of inquiry. The latter has to appropriate the material in detail, to analyse its different forms of development, to trace out their inner connection. Only after this work is done, can the actual movement be adequately described. If this is done successfully, if the life of the subject-matter is ideally reflected as in a mirror, then it may appear as if we had before us a mere a priori construction.83

This is the well-known distinction between Forschung (research) and Darstellung (presentation) which has been much discussed in Marxist literature.84 Without going into details here, two things can be noted. First, a shift in Marx’s thought towards a more pointed emphasis on the importance of concrete analysis instead of abstract schemes is discernible after 1870, at the same time he makes acquaintance with Russian materials and with Russian discussions on the future development of the country.

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He becomes more cautious in using such generalisations as yet in the first edition of Capital in 1867, which could be interpreted as a claim that dialectical “laws” force with necessity overall both the rise and the breakdown of capitalism. Many of his readers, especially in Russia, had taken this and like sentences as aprioristic claims. However, and secondly, Marx does not abandon the idea of dialectics. He merely defines more tightly the area of its validity. Dialectics, he now says expressly, can be put in use only after the object of research has first been subjected to an analysis. In other words, dialectics is but the second step in method; it is a manner of presentation. As a materialist, Marx of course must consider the analysis of reality the most important part of the research, and it depends on its results, whether and in which form a dialectical presentation can be applied.85 As we saw, the analysis of Russian peasant community and the prospects of the country’s economic development led Marx to the conclusion, which he consequently pointed to Vera Zasulich, that the Russian materials did not allow such a “dialectic presentation” which had taken place when Marx described capitalism in Western Europe.

A Nachspiel After the death of Marx (1883), Vera Zasulich continued to maintain the contact, now with Engels. The Narodnikism had in the 1880s begun to lose its previous position as a hegemonic force in the Russian revolutionary movement, as the Social Democracy, based on Marx’s ideas, was gaining growing support. Georgi Plekhanov, previously an active Narodnik himself believing in the prospect of a peasant revolution, went at the beginning of the 1880s through a theoretical and political re-evaluation and founded in the year of Marx’s death in Genève with a group of other like-minded Russians (i.a. Zasulich) an organisation Osvobozhdenie truda (The Liberation of Labour), the first germ of the future Russian Social Democratic Worker’s Party. Next year, in 1884, Plekhanov published the important work Nashi raznoglasija (Our Differences), where he summarised his new views against the Narodniks. He analysed critically the texts of Herzen, Chernyshevsky, Bakunin and Tkachev and continued then to show, that Russia was already well into capitalism. This tendency was favoured “by the whole dynamics of our social life”, and against capitalism were “only the more or less doubtful interests of a certain portion

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of the peasantry”.86 According to Plekhanov, the Narodnik strategy of promoting the peasants had led to a cul-de-sac, due to the inertia inherent in the agrarian way of life: We all know that the village commune of today must give place to communism or ultimately disintegrate. At the same time, the economic organisation of the commune has no springs to start it off on the road to communist development. While easing our peasants’ transition to communism, the commune cannot impart to them the initiative necessary for that transition. On the contrary, the development of commodity production is more and more undermining the traditional foundations of the commune principle. And our Narodnik intelligentsia cannot remove this basic contradiction…87

Plekhanov says here essentially the same as Marx and Engels in 1881 in their foreword to the Russian edition of the Manifesto: a mere peasant movement is backward-looking and has as such no prospect open towards a modern communist society; therefore it must become an ally of a proletarian movement. But he emphasises to a greater extent than Marx and Engels the active role of the proletariat, the “salt of the earth”: “…they alone can be the link between the peasantry and the socialist intelligentsia; they, and they alone, can bridge the historical abyss between the’people’ and the’educated’ section of the population”.88 This comment by Plekhanov touches upon a problematics that Marx had not sufficiently dealt with when discussing the prospects of the obshchina, namely the character of the subject of the new society. The peasantry, with its traditional way of life and backward world outlook, was hardly the suitable subject to build up a modern communist society. This was a problem which was not actual yet at the time Marx wrote his comments to Zasulich. The Bolsheviks encountered in full first after the October revolution. This is not the place to discuss it more in detail, so it maybe suffices here to refer, for example, to the novels of Andrej Platonov The Foundation Pit and Chevengur, which depict the tragicomical manner in which uneducated peasants understood “communism” in Russia of the 1920s. Plekhanov’s theoretical intervention led again to a discussion among the Narodniks, and Vera Zasulich wrote in April 1885 a letter to Engels asking for his opinion on the Nashi raznoglasija. Engels answered on April 23 somewhat shunningly. He complained that due to other duties

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he had time to read only the first 60 pages of the book. “However, the little I have read is, I think, enough to put me moreor less au fait with the disputed in question”.89 Then Engels continued: To begin with, let me repeat how proud I am to know that there exists among the younger generation in Russia a party which frankly and unreservedly accepts the great economic and historical theories evolved by Marx, and which has broken for good with all the anarchic and to some extent Slavophil traditions of its predecessors […] In my eyes, Marx’s historical theory is fundamentally essential to revolutionary tactics, if these are to be consistent and logical; to discover what those tactics ought to be, all one has to do is to apply the theory to economic and political conditions in the country concerned.90

However, touching upon the internal differences of Russian revolutionaries, Engels is, like Marx previously, most diplomatic: “I, for my part, am too ignorant of the present situation in Russia to suppose myself competent to assess in detail the tactics that might be required at any given moment”. He avoids to take a more detailed position claiming that “the internal and intimate history of the Russian revolutionary party, in particular that of the last few years, is to me a closed book”.91 A surprising claim, since Vera Zasulich could hardly have been unaware that Engels had after the mid-1870s posted himself up with energy on the study of Russian matters and its revolutionary movement. Alone in 1874–1875 he had published in the journal Volksstaat a series of articles under the rubric Refugee Literature, where he had criticised—partly by Marx’s instigation—not only the tactics of the Russian revolutionary Pëtr Tkachev, but even Pëtr Lavrov, called by Engels “Friend Peter”, but nevertheless “an eclectic who selects the best from all the different systems and theories: try everything and keep the best!”.92 The articles showed that Engels was rather well versed in the tactical discussions in the Russian revolutionary movement, but in his reply to Vera Zasulich he, however, abstained from commenting on them. One reason for Engels’ diplomatic attitude surely is that he does not view the coming revolution in Russia as a proletarian one, but draws a comparison with the great French revolution: What I know, or believe I know, of the situation in Russia leads me to think that that country is nearing its 1789. Revolution is bound to break out some time or other; it may break out any day. In conditions such as

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these the country is like a charged mine, all that is needed is to apply the match […]. It is one of those special cases where it is possible for a handful of men to effect a revolution, that is, to bring about at one stroke the collapse of an entire system whose equilibrium is more than labile (to use Plekhanov’s metaphor), and to release, by a single and intrinsically insignificant act, explosive forces which later become uncontrollable.93

Engels thus seems to give some reason to the radical Narodniks who believed that due to the specific constellations in Russia, the revolution there can be started even by a small minority (this was a Blanquist idea, against which Marx and Engels otherwise combatted). But at the same time he notes the uncontrollability of such a turn of events, again quoting from Plekhanov’s Nashi raznoglasija: Once the match has been applied to the powder, once the forces have been unleashed and the national energy has been converted from potential to kinetic (another of Plekhanov’s favourite and, indeed, excellent metaphors) – the men who have sprung the mine will be swept off their feet by an explosion a thousand times more powerful than they themselves.94

Engels finishes his letter by warning the Russian revolutionaries of pernicious illusions, but he does this in a strangely distanced manner, as if washing his hands: Suppose that these men imagine they will be able to seize power, what of it? Providing they make the hole which causes the dam to collapse, the resulting torrent of water will soon put paid to their illusions. But what if those illusions succeeded in endowing them with an exceptional strength of will? Would that be any cause for complaint? Men who have boasted of having effected a revolution have always found on the morrow that they didn’t know what they were doing; that once effected, the revolution has borne no resemblance at all to what they had intended. That is what Hegel calls the irony of history.95

Engels’ comparison with the coming Russian revolution with the French 1789 recalls Marx’s analysis of the latter carried out in 1852 in his Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. This probably is not a coincidence, since Engels was at the same time he answered to Zasulich96 writing a preface to the third German edition of Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire. In

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every case, the parallels are striking. Marx had characterised the protagonists of the 1789 revolution as acting in “self-deceptions that they needed in order to conceal from themselves the bourgeois limitations of the content of their struggles”.97 Engels thinks that in the Russian Revolution to come, the illusions—both political and ideological—will in like manner play their role, and although he does not say it outright, even a catastrophic outcome is possible. The pessimism of Engels’ prognose is astonishing. But it is explained by the fact that in Russia, a political force had not yet—not yet in the 1880s—emerged which would have been able to overcome the illusions and shortcomings of Narodnik radicalism. Plekhanov’s Nashi raznoglasija opened already new perspectives, but it was only a modest beginning yet.

Notes 1. Marx’s letter to Pavel Annenkov, December 28, 1846, MECW vol. 38, pp. 95–106. 2. The text was published in original French in a collection of letters to the literature critic Mikhail Stasjulevich (M. K. Lemke [ed.], M. M. Stasjulevich i ego sovremenniki v ikh perepiske, vol. I, St. Petersburg 1912). 3. Ewa Borowska, Marx and Russia, in: Studies in East European Thought, 54: 87, 2002//54: 87–103. 4. Karl Marx, Financial Failure of Government. – Cabs. – Ireland. – The Russian Question (The New York Daily Tribune, 12 August 1853), MECW vol. 12, p. 230. 5. Op. cit., p. 331. 6. MECW vol. 40, p. 552. 7. Borowska, op. cit., p. 88. 8. Op. cit., p. 90. 9. Karl Marx, Secret Diplomatic History of the Eighteenth Century, MECW vol. 15, p. 77. 10. Op. cit., p. 77. 11. Op. cit., p. 80. 12. Op. cit., p. 87. 13. Karl Marx, The Revolutionary Movement (Neue Rheinische Zeitung, January 1, 1849), MECW vol. 8, p. 215. 14. Karl Marx, Wage Labour and Capital [I.] (Neue Rheinische Zeitung, April 5, 1849), MECW vol. 9, p. 197. 15. At the moment of writing this, the Secret Diplomatic History has not yet been published in the new Marx-Engels Gesamtausgabe, but it is taken into

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16.

17.

18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23.

24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30.

the English edition of Marx’s and Engels’ Collected Works (vol. 15). There is an Internet version, too, in the address http://www.marxists.org/arc hive/marx/works/1857/russia/index.htm. Originally, it was published in the English journal The Free Press (first in Sheffield in June 1856, then in 1857 in London). In 1899, a version edited by Marx’s daughter Eleanor Marx Aveling was published (London: Swan Sonnenschein & Co.). Mansur M. Mukhamezhdanov, Ot vlasti idei k idee vlasti. Iz istorii Instituta marksizma-leninizma pri TsK KPSS, Moskva/Sankt-Peterburg: Nestor-Istorija 2018, p. 247 sqq. “To publish the brochure”, said Stalin, “would be very questionable: it would mean to carry out a special order from the bourgeoisie to whitewash the policy of England and to isolate Russia”. The brochure contains, Stalin said, “much rubbish [chepukha] with some grains of jewels”. “Marx’s name should be protected” (quotations from original archive sources, op. cit., p. 248). In Russian, Marx’s Revelations were published for the first time only during the perestroika, in the journal Voprosy istorii (1989, nos. 1–4). D. Riazanov, Anglo-russkie otnoshenija v otsenke Karla Marksa (Istorikokriticheskij etjud), Izdanie Petrogradskogo Soveta Rabochikh i Krasnoarmejskikh Deputatov, 1918, p. 3. Riazanov, op. cit., p. 50. The quotation is from Miliukov’s work Ocherki po istorii russkoj kul’tury, St. Peterburg 1898, p. 115 sqq. Op. cit., p. 58. Op. cit., p. 59. Op. cit., p. 120. Riazanov, op. cit., p. 28. Op. cit., p. 96. Later back in Sweden, Gyllenborg became the Chancery President and toiled from this position for a revanche against Russia, dreaming of a reconquest of the Baltic provinces lost in the Treaty of Nystad in 1721; on his initiative, a war with Russia was instigated (1741–1743), which ended with disastrous consequences for Sweden. Karl Marx, Herr Vogt, MECW vol 17, pp. 140–141. Riazanov, op. cit., p. 121. Friedrich Engels, Savoy and Nice, MECW vol. 16, pp. 609–610. Riazanov, op. cit., p. 122. Friedrich Engels, Refugee Literature. V. On Social Relations in Russia, MECW vol. 24, p. 50. Riazanov, op. cit., p. 124. Vasili Flerovskij, the pen-name of Vasilij Bervi (in encyclopaedic entires often mentioned as Bervi-Flerovskij, 1824–1918), was an adherent of Herzen, Belinskij, Chernyshevsky and one of the many theoreticians of Narodnism. He attempted to develop a theory of “revolutionary ethics” based on solidarity and equality. In 1877 he published in Genève an autobiographical work Na zhizn’ i smert’ (Upon Life and Death).

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31. Danielson’s letter to Marx 30 September, 1869, quoted here according to V. A. Tvardovskaja, B. S. Itenberg, Russkie i Karl Marks: vybor ili sud’ba? Moskva: Editorial URSS 1999, p. 129. 32. Marx to Engels, 23 October 1869, MECW vol. 43, p. 362. 33. Marx to Ludwig Kugelmann, 29 November 1869, MECW vol. 43, pp. 389–390. 34. Marx to Engels, 10. February, 1870, p. 423. 35. Op. cit., loc. cit. 36. Marx to Engels, 12. February 1870, MECW vol. 43, pp. 429–430. 37. V. A. Tvardovskaja, B. S. Itenberg, op. cit., p. 48. 38. Marx to Laura and Paul Lafargue, 5 March 1870, MECW vol. 43, p. 450. 39. V. P. Koz’min, Russkaja sektsija Pervogo Internatsionala, Moskva: Izd. Akad. Nauk SSSR, 1957, p. 60. Interestingly, Koz’min continues that “blaming Herzen, the young generation did not want to assess fully the turn which could be discerned in the political line of Kolokol after 1861, when Herzen became convinced about the ‘fraudulent’ character of the ‘freedom’ granted to the peasants by the government” (loc. cit.). Marx, too, does not seem to have been interested in such nuances of Herzen’s political activities. 40. Koz’min, op. cit., p. 44. 41. Serno-Solovëvich to Marx, Gèneve, 20 November 1868, in: K. Marks, F. Engel’s i revoljutsionnaja Rossija, Moskva: Izd. politicheskoj literatury 1967, pp. 161–165. 42. The Committee of the Russian section of the International to Marx, 12 March 1870, in: K. Marks, F. Engel’s i revoljutsionnaja Rossija, pp. 168– 169. The passage reads in original French: “Mais nous avons encore une autre tâche, c’est de démasquer le Panslavisme en engageant le jeunesse des pays slaves à lutter contre ces vielles idées qui n’ont servi qu’en profit de l’émpire tsariste…”. 43. Marx (on behalf of the General Council of the International) to the Russian section, 24 March 1870, in: MECW vol. 21, pp. 110–111. 44. This is the conjecture of Tvardovskaja and Itenberg, op. cit., p. 88. 45. Marx to Johann Philip Becker, 2. August 1870, MECW vol. 43, p. 27. The edition was published in Genève in Russian. Two volumes (voll. 3 and 4, Genève 1869 and 1870) were in Marx’s personal library. 46. Marx to Danielson, 12 December 1872, in: MECW vol. 44, p. 457. 47. Marx, Capital , vol. I, MECW vol. 35, p. 15. 48. Not yet published in the new MEGA, but in Arkhiv Marksa i Engel’sa, vol. XI, Moskva 1948. 49. For details, see A. I. Volodin, Yu. Karjakin, E. G. Plimak, Chernyshevskij ili Nechaev? O podlinnoj i mnimoj revoljutsionnosti v osvoboditel’nom dvizhenii Rossii 50–60-kh godov XIX veka, Moskva: Mysl’ 1976, p. 146 sqq.

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50. D. B. Riazanov, ‘Marks i Chernyshevskij’, in: D. B. Riazanov, Vchitivajas’ v Marksa… Izbrannye raboty po marksovedeniju, Moskva: Politicheskaja entsiklopedija 2018, p. 460. 51. Tvardovskaja and Itenberg, op. cit., p. 100. 52. N. G. Chernyshevskij, ‘Ocherki gogolevskogo perioda russkoj literatury’, in: Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v 15 tomakh, Moskva 1939 sqq., vol. 3, p. 207. 53. Actually, this Chernyshevskian interpretation of dialectics as merely a “concrete analysis” remained prevalent even among Russian Marxists such as Plekhanov and Lenin; for details, see Vesa Oittinen, ‘Which Kind of Dialectician Was Lenin?’, in: Tom Rockmore, Norman Levin (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Lenin’s Political Philosophy, London: Palgrave Macmillan 2018, pp. 63–88. 54. Another English rendering one sometimes meets in the literature is “Populism”. However, this term has nowadays quite other connotations and it is preferable not to use it when talking about the Russian Narodniks. In Soviet literature, there were attempts to distinguish the so-called “revolutionary democrats” (Chernyshevsky, Dobroliubov) from the Narodniks sensu stricto, but it is difficult to hold consequently fast to this distinction. In this study, I do not delve further in that question. 55. The raznochinetsy (from Russian raznyj, ‘different’ and chin, ‘estate’) were composed of intellectuals not belonging to the nobility. This stratum of society increased notably during the nineteenth century. 56. N. A. Troitskij, Krestonostsy sotsializma, Saratov: Iz-vo Saratovskogo universiteta 2002, p. 68 sqq. 57. P. L. Lavrov, Filosofija i sotsiologija. Izbrannye proizvedenija v dvukh tomakh, vol. 2, Moskva: Mysl’ 1965, p. 113. 58. See A. Volodin, B. Itenberg, Lavrov, Moskva: Molodaja Gvardija 1981 (series Zhizn’ znamechatel’nykh ljudej”), pp. 217–218. 59. Marx to Nikolai Danielson, 10 April 1879, MECW vol. 45, pp. 354–356. 60. Op. cit., p. 358. The comment is interesting even because Marx here again uses the word “superstructure”, which he now likens with the “façade of social edifice”. 61. Karl Marx, The Bourgeoisie and the Counter-Revolution, MECW vol. 8, p. 161 (originally in Neue Rheinische Zeitung No. 169, 11 December 1848). 62. Arkhiv Marksa i Engel’sa, vol. IV, Moskva – Leningrad 1929, pp. 390– 391. Quoted here according to N. V. Khessin, N. G. Chernyshevskij v bor’be za sotsialisticheskoe budushchee Rossii, Moskva: Mysl 1982, p. 230. 63. N. G. Chernyshevskij, ‘Kritika filosofskikh predubezhdenij protiv obshchinnogo vladenija’, in: N. G. Chernyshevskij, Sochinenija v dvukh tomakh, tom 2, Moskva: Mysl’ 1986, p. 610. 64. Op. cit., p. 637.

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65. So, for example, the editors of Chernyshevsky’s work in the last issue published in Soviet times (1986): “Chernyshevsky acts as a partisan of the common ownership of land. In order to defend his position, he uses Hegel’s dialectical ideas…” (N. G. Chernyshevskij, Sochinenija v dvukh tomakh, tom 2, p. 777). 66. Chernyshevskij, op. cit., p. 638, footnote. 67. Karl Marx, Capital I, MECW vol. 35, p. 15. 68. Op. cit., p. 201. 69. G. V. Plekhanov, ‘Our Differences’, in: G. V. Plekhanov, Selected Philosophical Works in Five Volumes, vol. I, Moscow: Progress Publishers 1974, p. 131. 70. Plekhanov, op. cit., p. 132. 71. Vasilij Pavlovich Vorontsov (1847–1912), a sociologist and economist, was one of the theoreticians of liberal Narodnism. Among his most important works can be mentioned Sud’by kapitalizma v Rossii (The Vicissitudes of Capitalism in Russia, 1882), a collection of articles Ocherki krest’janskogo khozjajstva (Essays on Peasant Economy, 1886) and Progressivnye techenija v krest’janskom khozjajstve (Progressive Tendencies in Peasant Economy, 1892). Like Mikhailovsky, Vorontsov was an adherent of the ideas of Lavrov’s “subjective sociology”. 72. Marx to Vera Zasulich, 8. March 1881, MECW vol. 24, p. 370. 73. Op. cit., p. 370. 74. Op. cit., p. 371. 75. Op. cit., p. 371. 76. Op. cit., p. 349. 77. Op. cit., p. 354. 78. Op. cit., p. 357. 79. For dating, see Marcello Musto, Karl Marx. Biografia intellettuale e politica. 1857–1883, Torino: Einaudi 2018, p. 190. 80. Marx to Vera Zasulich, 8. March 1881, MECW vol. 24, p. 350. 81. Karl Marx, Frederick Engels, Preface to the Second Russian Edition of the Manifesto of the Communist party, op. cit., p. 426. 82. Karl Marx, Capital I, MECW vol. 35, p. 751. 83. Op. cit., pp. 18–19. 84. For a comprehensive survey, see e.g. Veikko Pietilä, Forschung/Darstellung, s.v. in: Historisch-Kritisches Wörterbuch des Marxismus, vol. 4, Berlin: Argument 1999, coll. 696–701. 85. I have discussed this more at length in: Vesa Oittinen, ‘Marx’s Method: A Kantian Moment’, in: Pablo Sánchez León (coord.), Karl Marx y la critica de la economía política. Contribuciones a una tradición, Navarra: Pamiela 2019, pp. 99–112, especially p. 100 sqq. 86. G. V. Plekhanov, ‘Our Differences’, in: G. V. Plekhanov, Selected Philosophical Works in Five Volumes, vol. I, p. 273.

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87. 88. 89. 90. 91. 92.

93. 94. 95. 96.

97.

Op. cit., p. 344. Op. cit., p. 345. Engels to Vera Zasulich, 23 April 1885, MECW vol. 47, p. 279. Op. cit., pp. 279–280. Op. cit., p. 280. Friedrich Engels, Refugee Literature, II , MECW vol. 24, p. 19. The fifth Volksstaat article was later in 1875 published as a separate brochure with the title Soziales aus Russland. Engels to Vera Zasulich, 23 April 1885, MECW vol. 47, p. 280. Op. cit., p. 280. Op. cit., pp. 280–281. The exact date when Engels wrote his foreword is not known, but the publishers of the MECW put it into “the first half of 1885”; cf. MECW vol. 26, p. 303. Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, MECW vol. 11, p. 104.

CHAPTER 2

The Marx–Mikhailovsky Dispute: Not Only on Empirical Matters, but on Methodology, Too

“It is an irony of fate that the Russians, against whom I have been fighting incessantly for 25 years, not only in German, but also in French and English, have always been my ‘patrons’”, wrote Marx to Ludwig Kugelmann in October 1868 after he had heard—to his own surprise—that a Russian edition of Capital was under the way.1 No doubt, Marx may have felt himself flattered, but he hurried to express some doubts about the character of the Russian reception of his main work, quoting Voltaire: Ce n’est pas pour les tailleurs et les bottiers 2 —indicating that Capital might be read in Russia only as kind of an aristocratic pastime. It soon proved that this was not exactly the manner of how Marx’s chef d’oeuvre was taken up in Russia, but he had right in his suspicion that the reception would be different from that in the West. In fact, the translation of Capital dropped outright into a discussion which had consumed the minds of Russian intelligentsia already a half century. The core problematics of this discourse touched important questions concerning the historical alternatives for the countries outside the West European and North American core of developed capitalism. Among the Russian intelligentsia there had at the beginning of the 1840s emerged two main currents, the Westernisers or Zapadniki (from the Russian západ—“West”), who supported the politics of importing Western culture and institutions into Russia, and the Slavophiles, who insisted on the importance of maintaining the traditional Russian culture © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 V. Oittinen, Marx’s Russian Moment, Marx, Engels, and Marxisms, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-29662-8_2

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and way of life. Of course, these etiquettes were rough generalisations only, and many felt uneasy with such dichotomic alternatives. One of the Russian thinkers unsatisfied with the Zapadniki vs. Slavophiles dichotomy was the journalist, literature critic and social scientist Nikolai Mikhailovsky (1842–1904). He was an important figure in the early reception of Marx’s thought in Russia, too. He was a sympathisant of the Narodnik movement and one of the main theoreticians of its moderate faction. The Narodniks were an indigenous radical and revolutionary movement in Russia since the mid-1800s; the name comes from the Russian naród, “people”, and hence it has often been rendered in the West as “Populists”, but this is not quite an adequate translation, as it does not reflect the specificity of this even intellectually significant movement. The Narodniks attempted to overcome the unfruitful Slavophiles vs. Zapadniki deadlock by developing a vision in which the Western idea of social progress should be combined with the Slavophile position of defending indigenous Russian forms of life. It was just this discourse constellation into which the Russian translation of Marx’s Capital dropped, and Mikhailovsky recognised at once the importance of the book. Mikhailovsky followed keenly the trends of Western thought. He was one of the main conveyors of the newest ideas of Western philosophy and sciences for the Russian public, thanks to his position as the collaborator of the prestigious journal Otechestvennye Zapiski, where he published his contributions since 1868 and, from 1877 on, as one of the full-time redacteurs. He noted Marx for the first time in 1870, in a series of articles on Darwin, where he commented—rather critically—the early attempts to apply Darwin’s theories on social sciences.3 Marx was mentioned in these articles at least a dozen times. There is, however, no indication that Marx himself never had been aware of this comparison of his materialist view of history with Darwinism. Two years later, when the first volume of Capital was published in a Russian translation, Mikhailovsky again returned to Marx. He published in the April 1872 issue of Otechestvennye zapiski an anonymous review “Po povodu russkogo izdanija knigi Karla Marksa” (On the Occasion of the Russian publication of the work of Karl Marx). He constated at the outset that “we seldom have to announce the publication of a new book with such a pleasure”, since the book has come out “in good time”.4 However, he did not present further the content of Marx’s work, but restricted himself to the announcement of the publication. The real goal

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of the article was to attach the attention to the importance of Marx’s masterpiece for those who wanted to modernise Russia. For this reason, he said that he wanted to explain at a bit more length why Capital to his mind had been published in good time for the Russians, since this gives “a suitable opportunity to answer to some remarks and notes which we had to hear concerning our journal”.5 The answer grows into an essay of nine pages, which deals almost exclusively with the matters of Russia’s future and mentions Marx’s book only en passant. Mikhailovsky attempts to defend the Narodnik point of view against multiple adversaries. During a long period in the nineteenth century, the discourses of Russian intellectuals had moved in the force field created by the opposition between Westernisers and Traditionalists. Mikhailovsky will get out of this situation: “Who are we? ‘Slavophiles’ or ‘Zapadniki’, ‘Progressists’ or ‘Conservatives’? […][O]ne must wonder that these labels have been able to survive so long in our social and literary discourses […] There are no real Slavophiles nor real Zapadniks in the actual life”.6 Yet in the 1840s, when the Zapadnik/Slavophile distinction was coined, the Russians looked at the West as if a united whole, but now such an optics has became obsolete. Since the revolutions of the year 1848, it should have become obvious that there are deep-going cleavages in the Western societies, and for this reason the notion of a Zapadnik as simply an adherent of Westernisation has become problematic. In a similar way, the dreams of the Slavophiles of preserving a pure indigenous Russianness have become problematic. Mikhailovsky mocks the Pan-Slavist ideologue Nikolai Danilevsky (1825–1885) for his zeal to replace the Western frack with a Russian kaftan, but comments then that one might prefer Russian clothing for purely aesthetic reason, without needing a backing from Slavophile ideological system. According to Mikhailovsky, all evidence stays that Russia will follow the path already traversed by Western Europe, especially after the reform of 1861 when the serfdom was abandoned: But we know that the closer we come to the day when the civilization will become triumphant, the bigger is the change that it will among us take the same forms it took in Europe, and it has, besides others, taken even wrong forms. As long as the serfdom stood firm, it was natural to concentrate all efforts towards its abolishment. But after the serfdom has become shattered, the center of gravity of the question has moved: now the question of the day is not the liberation of the serfs, but their liberation

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with land. When the system of serfdom was overthrown, it has become quite natural to mention the disadvantages of its fall; not the fact of the fall of serfdom itself is to be reproached, but those circumstances, which accompany it.7

Mikhailovsky was thus concerned about the consequences the further development of capitalism would have for the fate of the Russian people. The serfs had got their freedom by the decree of the Czar in 1861, but they had got nothing else: they could not afford to buy the lands to which they earlier had been bound by the villeinage system. As a result of this separation of immediate producers from the means of production (although Mikhailovsky did not use these precise Marxian terms), the serfs were transformed into poor masses which would serve a recruitment basis for a soon imminent capitalist development in Russia. This was a common topic among the Narodnik intelligentsia at least since the 1860s. For example, already in 1861, the year of the abolition of serfdom, another writer, Nikolai Shelgunov had an article in the journal Sovremennik, where he reviewed the situation of the industrial proletariat in England and France referring extensively to young Engels’ book on the condition of working class in England. He concluded that the path of Russia will not be the same as of those Western countries, since the social presuppositions for a capitalist development did not exist in Russia: “Where is our bourgoisie? Does one mean those petty-bourgeois people who live in the outskirts in the towns and differ from the peasants only in that they have forgotten how to till the soil? Or do we will create in Russia this privileged class, which in the West has grabbed in their hands everything and have left for the rest of the population nothing but the right to breathe air, which to boot is not always clean […]?”8 The translator of Capital into Russian, German Lopatin, adhered to these Narodnik views, too, which was noted by Marx and Engels. Yet in August 1870, Marx was rather hopeful of Lopatin: “He is the only ‘reliable’ Russian I have got to know up to now, and I shall soon succeed in driving his national prejudices out of him”.9 Three years later, in a letter of November 1873, Engels was already much more pessimistic: “It is unlikely that Lopatin and Outine will ever be very firm friends […] Moreover, Lopatin remains a great Russian patriot and still treats the russkoe delo [the Russian cause] as something special, having nothing to do with the West”.10

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In his announcement of the Russian edition of Marx’s Capital , Mikhailovsky repeats the same concerns about Russia’s future as Shelgunov and other Narodnik writers. In the social and cultural heritage of Russia, there is much which deserves to be preserved from the “perversions of European civilization [nepravilnostej evropejskoj tsivilizatsii]”.11 But just for this reason, Marx’s Capital can be a useful book for the Russian readers, although not exactly in the sense the author had thought. Rather, it serves as a caveat for the Russians to avoid the pitfalls of the Western development. Marx himself, a prominent representant of the International, stood in opposition to the European civilisation. But although Marx represented the revolutionary elements in Europe, his theories could, according to Mikhalovsky, in no way undermine the “social peace” in Russia. The reason was simple: “The ideas and interests, for which he is fighting, are among us yet too weak to cause any dangers […]. But they are already strong enough to make us decidedly worry about the results of their further development. Just for this reason we said that Marx’s book has come very timely”.12 Mikhailovsky’s review of 1872 did not contain any detailed scrutiny of the economic theory presented in Capital , but attempted, as the Soviet historian of economy Abram Reuel noted, “to fulfil certain tasks of political character”.13 Marx’s work was useful, since it pointed to the negative sides of European civilisation so that the Russians could be able to avoid them. One could indeed say that this Narodnik attitude to Marx’s work was characterised by a very peculiar anticapitalism ante rem! There followed a silence of some five years, before Mikhailovsky again returned to the significance of Marx’s analyses of capitalism for Russia. Now he did it in a much more extensive article, which saw the light in the October issue of Otechestvennye Zapiski of 1877, and which has become famous because now Marx himself noted it and wrote a reply, which, however, remained unpublished for a long time. The occasion for Mikhailovsky to return to Marx’s ideas was an article by Yuri Zhukovsky, “Karl Marks i ego kniga o kapitale” (Karl Marx and his book on the capital) in Vestnik Evropy 1877. This was a journal of liberal orientation, published from 1861 to 1918, and politically it was more moderate than Mikhailovsky’s Otechestvennye Zapiski, which at this time more and more openly supported radical Narodnik views. The Russian discussion around Capital in the latter half of the 1870s did not, unlike the previous comments on the book, remain unnoted for Marx, since Marx’s Russian contacts, in the first instance his translator

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Nikolai Danielson, kept him à jour and sent him materials. On 15th of November 1878, Marx wrote to Danielson and thanked him for a sending dispatched already in the previous year: “Of the polemics of Tschischerin and other people against me, I have seen nothing, save what you sent me in 1877 (one article of Sieber, and the other, I think, of Michailoff [i.e. Mikhailovsky], both in the Fatherlandish Annals [i.e. Otechestvennye Zapiski] in reply to that queer would-be Encyclopedist—Mr Joukowski). Prof. Kowalewskiy, who is here, told me that there had been a rather lively polemics on the Capital ”.14 A little later, on 28 November 1878, Marx again thanks Danielson for a dispatch, which this time contained i.a. a review of Marx’s views, written by Boris Chicherin.15 The author was, like Zhukovsky, politically a liberal, and a professor of Russian law at the Moscow University, a position from which he, however, had retired in 1868 as a protest against the repressions of the Czarist regime and withdrawn to his estate, where he began to write a history of political theories. His comments on Marx, published in 1878, were part of a more extensive work on German socialists. Both Chicherin and Zhukovsky had a superficial view of Marx’s oeuvre which they evaluated from the viewpoint of their own liberal convictions. A situation emerged in which the Narodnik intelligents thought that it is necessary to defend Marx’s ideas, at least to the extent they seemed applicable for Russian realities. In the October 1877 issue of Otechestvennye Zapiski two replies to Zhukovsky were published, the authors being Nikolai Ziber (Sieber),16 the professor of economics at the University of Kiev, and Mikhailovsky. Sieber wrote later yet a critique of Chicherin. It was, however, only Mikhailovsky’s article to which Marx wrote his unpublished reply. Marx did not even note Ziber’s article against Zhukovsky, although he already in the afterword to the second German edition of Capital (1872) had mentioned approvedly Ziber’s study on Ricardo’s theory of value, and thus had known him already for some years.17 Mikhailovsky begins his 1877 article by noting that in Russia there exists a tendency to criticise authorities of Western science—such as Darwin, Comte, Spencer, Buckle and Marx—on vague bases and Yuri Zhukovsky’s article in Vestnik Evropy (issue 9, 1877) serves as an example of such critique. Before going to examine Zhukovsky in detail, Mikhailovsky gives a short exposition of the “philosophico-historical view of Marx”, as presented in Capital :

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In the sixth chapter of Capital there is a paragraph [sic! – V.O.] with the title “The So-Called Primitive Accumulation”. By this Marx meant a historical overview of the first steps of a capitalist mode of production, but he gave us something much more – a whole philosophico-historical theory. It is, generally taken, very interesting, and especially interesting for us Russians.18

Mikhailovsky resumes the main points in Marx’s exposition of primitive accumulation correctly, noting that the capitalist mode of production demands that there exist two groups (razrjady) of people: those who own the money and means of production, and those who sell their labour, i.e. the free workers. The primitive accumulation can be described as the process in which the workers of the old pre-capitalist society become separated from the means of production, to which they earlier were in a way or another attached. But, continues Mikhailovsky his resumé, the process does not stop here. Following “the immanent laws” of the capitalist production itself, a further “socialisation” (Vergesellschaftung) of labour takers place. This time not only the workers are expropriated, but the capitalists themselves. One capitalist slays the others, the few expropriate the many.19

However, as at the same time the cooperative form of labour develops further, we get a contradictory picture of the whole process: Next to the all horrors of pauperism, squalor and oppression, to which this process subsumes the masses, goes learning, unification, organization of these masses “through the mechanism of the capitalist process of production itself”. And finally, the capitalist shell cannot resist this “socialisation”: “the expropriators become expropriated” […] Here in a condensed form the philosophico-historical view of Marx.20

Now, says Mikhailovsky, let us consider a Russian, who would believe in the correctness of this theory of history. This is a very possible case, since Marx is able, thanks to his general scientific physiognomy, to evoke an unrestricted trust […] Such a Russian, if he does not live only in his head and does not abstain from practical life, would be in a formidably strange and difficult situation. This double-edged, terrible and at the same time beneficial process of “socialization” of labour, or, rather, the form of socialization which Marx describes,

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has progressed very little among us in the Holy Russia. Our peasant is not at all to the extent “liberated” from the land and means of production as it is demanded for a blooming development of the capitalist production […] On the other side, our capitals are deplorable, when compared with their European counterparts. Consequently, we have yet to follow Europe through the entire process which Marx described and elevated to the level of a philosophico-historical theory. The difference would, however, be that we shall repeat the process, that is, realise it consciously. In every case the Russian who believes in the correctness of Marx’s historical theory must be conscious of it. Marx did not, of course, conceal the heavy and disgusting sides of the process. On the contrary, he put them, so to say, in an opionate manner.21

As an example of Marx’s “opionatedness”, Mikhailovsky quoted in extenso from the end of chapter 23 of Capital : If the influence of capitalist production, which on the European continent degrades the human race by excessive work, division of labour, subjugation under the machine, making the adolescent and feminine bodies into cripples and diminishing the conditions of life, is going as hitherto develop hand in hand with the competition for national armies, public debt, taxes, elegant warfare etc., so it is possible that the renovation of Europe by the knout and obligate infusion of Kalmuk blood, prophesied by the halfRussian and full Moscovite Herzen (this belletrist has, by the way, not made his discoveries about “Russian” Communism in Russia, but in the works of the Prussian government counsellor Haxthausen) will finally prove to be irrevocable.22

This harangue was to be found only in the first, 1867 edition of Capital , and in the Russian edition of 1872, which closely followed the original text. The tirade about “Half Russian and entire Moscovite Herzen” indeed seems to revive Marx’s old Russophobic sentiments and old rancour towards Aleksandr Herzen, the famous Russian émigré and editor of the journal Kolokol in London. It is interesting to note, that Marx obviously later considered this passage as inappropriate, since he has deleted it from subsequent editions of Capital . Be it as it may, Mikhailovsky comments Marx’s insulting words calmly: Let us not go into the details of this escapade [etoi vykhodki], into those “knouts” and “Kalmuk blood”; already from his general tone it is not difficult to see, how Marx should, from his own point of view, relate to

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the attempts of the Russian people to find for their fatherland a path of development which is different from that which Western Europe followed and follows. As it already several times has been shown, these attempts do not at all suppose that one should be a Slavophile or have a mystical faith on the special high qualities of the Russian soul. One needs only take the lessons from European history. However, from the same escapade by Marx one can see, to which degree we have it difficult to cope with the situation without such attempts. Actually, the Russian people have already got a too burdensome share to add to it yet that which “unterwühlt die Menschenrace”. Marx’s escapade is, of course, purely ironic. He is quite convinced that to renew [i.e. to modernise – V. O.] Europe no external remedies are needed, since the process of its inner development will lead to its renewing by the socialisation of labour [putem obobshchestvlenija truda]. And it is easy for him to be ironic, since a significant and the most burdensome part of this process has already taken place; but we are in a quite different situation.

And now Mikhailovsky comes to his main point: All of this “making the adolescent and feminine bodies into cripples” and so on is yet in ahead of us, and from the viewpoint of Marx’s historical theory we not only should not protest against these Verkrüppelungen, which would mean to kick against the pick, but even rejoice of them, as a necessary, although steep stairway leading to the temple of happiness. It is difficult to deal with such a contradiction, which would tear apart the heart of a Russian disciple of Marx at every step […] A role as an observer, which with the neutrality of a Pimen would write the chronique of a double-edged progress, maybe might suit for him. But he cannot actively take part in it […] If he is a disciple of Marx, his ideal will consist, among others, of the concurrence of labour and property, that the land and tools and means of production belong to the worker. But at the same time, if he is a disciple of Marx on philosophico-historical views, he should be happy when labour and property diverge, the relations between the worker and the conditions of production break as the first steps of a necessary and in the last instance beneficial process. He should, consequently, greet the cancellation of the points of his own ideal. Of course, such a collision of the moral feeling with the historical necessity must be solved in favour of the necessity.23

However, continues Mikhailovsky, one must be quite sure, whether the historical process “really is necessarily such as depicted by Marx”. Corrections to the theory might be found even from Marx himself, but “we

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should think seven times before we cut ourselves off from other paths than the one envisaged by the German economist”.24 So, a critique of Marx’s views is needed—but not every kind of critique is useful. Mikhailovsky takes up Yuri Zhukovsky, who had in the issue 9/1877 of Vestnik Evropy published an article on Marx. He begins with a characteristic of Zhukovsky as a writer, whom he compares with a peacock displaying its tail. Zhukovsky stepped up first as a reformator of Ricardo’s political economy, which he wanted to re-interpret with differential and integral calculus; later, he attempted to explain the social sciences with the laws of mechanical physics, declaring—inter alia—that he was going to publish a book on the theory of light, which, however, has not come out.25 As to Zhukovsky’s assessment of Marx, so “the almost only one correct observation” concerns Marx’s “predilection for dialectics”: In fact, despite of his protest against the Hegelian dialectics, Marx resorts with pleasure, even with too much pleasure, to Hegel’s dialectics, which unnecessarily complicates and exacerbates the understanding of his results. Everybody has already for a long time ago noted this (especially Dühring, who by the way is very unfair towards Marx, came at this in his “Critical History of Political Economy and Socialism”), and Marx himself has considered it necessary to answer to critical voices in the second edition of “Capital”. However, although Marx should not be absolved from this sin, Mr. Zhukovsky should have remembered that which he never had understood very well, namely that the Hegelian dialectics, just thanks to its emptiness, its lack of content, sometimes may serve as “an occasional outer framework, in which the author has put results which he has got not in an aprioristic manner, but by a pure analysis of facts”, that a “metaphysic form” might be “only a mechanical addition to a content independent of it”. Just with these words Mr. Zhukovsky once ([…] in 1866) characterized Proudhon’s inclination to Hegelian dialectics (in the brochure Prudon i Lui Blan). But now the only difference in this respect between Proudhon and Marx consist in that the latter is not acquantained with Hegel only by hearsay, like Proudhon, and therefore Marx presents Hegel more cunningly, although too amply.26

Although Mikhailovsky does not dissent with the general verdict which Zhukovsky had cast upon Marx’s “Hegelianism”, he sees many other faults in his presentation of the ideas of the German socialist. Zhukovsky does not understand, according to Mikhailovsky, that the “Hegelianism” (gegelevshchina) in Marx actually is nothing but a “contingent outer

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frame”. If Marx had only declared that the modern society develops according to the law that it first negates its previous state and then negates this negation, so “he would have been a pure Hegelian who builds the laws of history from the depths of his own mind”. But everyone who reads Capital , knows that Marx does not say only this. On the contrary, everyone who takes even a look at the presentation of the primitive accumulation, should understand that “the Hegelian formula can be separated from the content pressed in it as easily as a glove from the hand or a cap from the head, doing no harm to the hand or to the head”.27 Against Zhukovsky’s accusations of Marx’s formalism, Mikhailovsky quotes from the Foreword of the first edition of Capital the passage, where Marx forespeaks for Continental Europe, especially for Germany, the same development England already has gone through. “There it will take a form more brutal or more humane, according to the degree of development of the working class itself”.28 For this reason, it should be important to note the role played by English factory legislation, which has been able to milder the worst excesses of capitalism, and apply the same laws on the Continent. In other words, as Marx constates, “[o]ne nation can and should learn from others”.29 Referring to these words, Mikhailovsky notes that “exactly there lie those remediations that can be found from Marx himself against a fatalistic inevitability of the historical process”.30 Despite this possibility of a “milder” form of capitalism, Mikhailovsky does not see any reason to give up his initial verdict, according to which a capitalist development would generally be pernicious for Russia: It is thus possible to mitigate to a certain degree the inevitability of the process; it is possible and one should, as Marx’s image goes, to alleviate the pains of birthgiving. But it is obvious that these mitigations are for us of little help, because so desirable a development and a given direction of factory legislation might be, it could cover only a relatively very small amount of the people.31

For Mikhailovsky, Zhukovsky is unable to find nuances in Marx. He takes at a face value the deterministic Hegelian schemes Marx uses, not noticing that “if one removes from Capital its heavy, awkward and unnecessary cover of Hegelian dialectics […], we see there excellently reworked material for solving the general question of how forms relate to the material

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presuppositions of their existence, and an excellent formulation of this problem on a specific domain”.32 Actually, …the whole of Capital is dedicated to an inquiry of how, when a social form has emerged, its specific traits develop […] Marx’s book is in need of an extensive reworking in the sense that copious excrescences and streaks of unnecessary dialectical subtleties be removed, but exactly the analysis of the relation of a given social form to the material presuppositions of its existence will always remain a monument of the logical power and immense erudition of its author.33

One of the authorities of Mr. Zhukovsky is the German historian Heinrich von Sybel. Comparing a brochure of von Sybel34 with the theses of Zhukovsky, Mikhailovsky shows that both use the same apological argument against Marx’s labour theory of value. von Sybel tried to show, that since only human labour produces value, and only human labour has teleological character, so the capitalist and the fabricant create value, when they set goals for production. Zhukovsky expands this argumentation to a more general theory. For him, the psychical work becomes the real source of value, instead of material work. For example, you invent a new kind of shovel, with which you can dig two times as much ditches as previously, and so you produce surplus value, thanks to the mental labour involved in the invention. Ridiculing this kind of value theory, Mikhailovsky remarks that both von Sybel and Zhukovsky “expand the concept of a capitalist to encompass all representants of psychic work”.35 After yet some critical remarks against Zhukovsky and his “sophisms” against Marx (as, for example, the claim that it is a mistake to find in the length of the labour day a measure for surplus value production, since the capitalist could hire more workers instead of trying to lengthen the work day of single labourers), Mikhailovsky sums up the main points of his critique of Zhukovsky: I call the reader to concentrate on the following points: (1) Marx’s attitude to the forms of propriety is diametrically opposed to that which Zhukovsky gives in his exposition; (2) the announcement that Marx avoids the study of material presuppositions of production and does not take into account the level of sophistication of the workman is, again, diametrally opposed to the truth;

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(3) especially the process of socialisation of labour, which for Marx is of extraordinary significance, is concealed from the readers of Vestnik Evropy; (4) concealed, too, are the relations of Marx to classical political economy, that is, to Adam Smith and Ricardo; (5) “physical labour” as the only creator of surplus (with the help of the forces of nature), is a confused conglomerate; it does not represent anything pervasive and independent neither in the sphere of production nor in the distribution.36

Marx’s Reply Marx, who had received the issue of Otechestvennye Zapiski in which Mikhailovsky’s review was published, read it keenly and set down to write—in French—a reply to the redaction, a reply which, however, remained a fragment and was published only much later. In his reply, Marx first constates that Mikhailovsky “is evidently a clever man” and attempts then to explain the insulting remarks on Herzen he had made at the end of Chapter 32 of Capital . Trying to downplay their significance, he calls the passage “an hors d’oeuvre” only and continues then: What is my complaint against this writer there? That he discovered the Russian commune not in Russia but in the book written by Haxthausen, Prussian Counsellor of State, and that in his hands the Russian commune only serves as an argument to prove that rotten old Europe will be regenerated by the victory of pan-Slavism. My estimate of this writer may be right or it may be wrong, but it cannot in any case furnish a clue to my views regarding the efforts “of Russians to find a path of development for their country which will be different from that which Western Europe pursued and still pursues,” etc.37

Marx thus seems to think that Herzen’s interpretation of the significance of the Russian commune is only an argument for the pan-Slavism. The idea of the pernicious influence of pan-Slavism is a recurrent motive—one might say: an idée fixe—in Marx already since the revolution of 1848. In that year, the Czechs refused to participate in the democratic Frankfurt Assembly with the argument that they had, as Slaves, interests different from those of the Germans. In the eyes of Marx, this was tantamount to a betrayal of the sake of the revolution. The subsequent development of the pan-Slavist movement only confirmed Marx’s suspicions, as the

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pan-Slavists began to rely on the Russian empire as the protector of all Slavic people. Marx’s aversion against pan-Slavism, which he regarded as a tool of Russian autocracy, explains the strange case that he and Alexander Herzen never socialised, although both lived in London as revolutionary émigrées. However, now Marx concedes that his estimate of Herzen “may be right or it may be wrong” (interestingly indeed, he removed the passage on Herzen from the later editions of Capital !). Nevertheless, he assures that his personal opinion of “this man” does not affect his views concerning the future development of Russia. Marx then goes ahead, noting that Mikhailovsky should have guessed his opinion concerning the future of Russia, since he quotes in the afterword to the second edition of Capital (1873) “the great Russian scholar and critic, N. Tschernyschewsky”,38 to whose views he does concur: In his remarkable articles this writer has dealt with the question whether, as her liberal economists maintain, Russia must begin by destroying the village commune [la commune rurale] in order to pass to the capitalist regime, or whether, on the contrary, she can without experiencing the tortures of this regime appropriate all its fruits by developing the particular historic conditions already given her [ses propres données historiques ]. He pronounces in favour of this latter solution. And my honourable critic [Mikhailovsky – V. O.] would have had at least as much reason for inferring from my consideration for this “great Russian critic and man of learning” that I shared his views on the question, as for concluding from my polemic against the “literary man” and Pan-Slavist that I rejected them.39

In his reply to Mikhailovsky, Marx then yet specifies his views on Russia’s path of development: The chapter on primitive accumulation does not pretend to do more than trace the path by which, in Western Europe, the capitalist order of economy emerged from the womb of the feudal order of economy […] Now what application to Russia can my critic make of this historical sketch? Only this: If Russia is tending to become a capitalist nation after the example of the Western European countries, and during the last years she has been taking a lot of trouble in this direction – she will not succeed without having first transformed a good part of her peasants into proletarians; and after that, once taken to the bosom of the capitalist regime, she will experience its pitiless laws like other profane peoples. That is all.

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However, Mikhailovsky has tried to read more out of Marx’s work than is possible: He feels himself obliged to metamorphose my historical sketch of the genesis of capitalism in Western Europe into an historico-philosophic theory of the marche generale [general path] imposed by fate upon every people, whatever the historic circumstances in which it finds itself, in order that it may ultimately arrive at the form of economy which will ensure, together with the greatest expansion of the productive powers of social labour, the most complete development of man. But I beg his pardon. (He is both honouring and shaming me too much).

In order to fend off accusations of determinism, Marx quotes from Capital an example of how similar processes may, when other circumstances are different, lead to quite different results: In several parts of Capital I allude to the fate which overtook the plebeians of ancient Rome. They were originally free peasants, each cultivating his own piece of land on his own account. In the course of Roman history they were expropriated. The same movement which divorced them from their means of production and subsistence involved the formation not only of big landed property but also of big money capital. And so one fine morning there were to be found on the one hand free men, stripped of everything except their labour power, and on the other, in order to exploit this labour, those who held all the acquired wealth in possession. What happened? The Roman proletarians became, not wage labourers but a mob of do-nothings more abject than the former “poor whites” in the southern country of the United States, and alongside of them there developed a mode of production which was not capitalist but dependent upon slavery. Thus events strikingly analogous but taking place in different historic surroundings led to totally different results.40

Marx did not, however, get the reply to Mikhailovsky ready, and the draft was published only much later. Four years after the publication of Mikhailovsky’s article, in 1881, Vera Zasulich turned to Marx with a question on the same problematics which Mikhailovsky had dealt with in his essay, namely the problem should Russia “repeat” the development of Western Europe. Even in this case, Marx’s reply was negative, leaving different alternatives open. In his final formulation of a letter to Zasulich, Marx wrote:

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[T]he "historical inevitability" of this process is expressly limited to the countries of Western Europe. […] Hence the analysis provided in Capital does not adduce reasons either for or against the viability of the rural commune, but the special study I have made of it, and the material for which I drew from original sources, has convinced me that this commune is the fulcrum of social regeneration in Russia, but in order that it may function as such, it would first be necessary to eliminate the deleterious influences which are assailing it from all sides, and then ensure for it the normal conditions of spontaneous development. I have the honour to be, dear Citizen, Yours very faithfully, Karl Marx.41

These words of 1881 remained the final ones of Marx on the Russian question. He stresses the importance of a concrete analysis of the social and economic development of Russia and the influence of external factors. The obshchina, the Russian peasant commune can serve the “social regeneration in Russia”, but only with the proviso that “les influences déletères” can be removed. The 1877 letter to the redaction of Otechestvennye zapiski remained unknown, until Engels found it after the death of Marx among his papers. He sent a copy of it to Vera Zasulich in Genève in 1884, and it was published first in the issue No. 5 of Vestnik Narodnoi Voli in 1886, and two years later in Russian legal press, too, in the October 1888 issue of the journal Juridicheskij vestnik.

A Nachspiel of 1894 . . . and Further Mikhailovsky himself returned yet in 1894 to his article of 1877. Again, the reason to take up the old questions of Russia’s path into modernity were the discussions among Russian Narodniks. This time, Mikhailovsky had already grown more critical. Writing now for the journal Russkoe Bogatstvo regular overviews of literature and actual politics, he again took up the question of Russia’s future development in the first issue of the year 1894, on the occasion of letters he had received after he had reviewed critically V. V.’s booklet Nashi napravlenija (‘Our Currents’; St. Petersburg

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1893). Behind the initials stood Vasili Vorontsov (1847–1918), a Narodnik ideologue of reformist orientation, who already in the 1880s had written about the perspectives of capitalism in Russia.42 In his new book, he criticised the Russian Marxists, who had emerged as a new current in the Russian revolutionary movement since the 1880s. Against the claims of Georgi Plekhanov, according to whom the Narodniks were stuck into a hopeless utopian view of a non-capitalist, indigenous development path for Russia, Vorontsov accused the Marxists of making propaganda for capitalism as a historically necessary phase. Actually, the Russian Marxists were for Vorontsov only “pseudo-Marxists”, as their strategy was so different from that of Western Social Democracy. In his review of Vorontsov, Mikhailovsky commented wryly, that to his mind, “no one is compelled to choose between ‘Narodnikism’ and ‘Marxism’”. He noted, further, that the moment of Narodnikism had already passed: this current had not managed to formulate an adequate strategy for the development of Russia; on the other side, he did not adhere to the analyses of Marxists, which according to him were too deterministic. Mikhailovsky had got some reader’s letters from Marxist activists, who tried to answer to the accusation that they insisted on the necessity of going through a capitalist phase of development. One reader, whom Mikhailovsky quotes in extenso, put it in the following manner: Since the beginning of the 1870s, you [i.e. Mikhailovsky – V. O.] you have attempted to prove, that there exist in Russia specific conditions, thanks to which it might evade a capitalist stage of development. We deny the existence of such conditions. We perceive, that the process of economic development consists, as hitherto, of the destruction of the economic organization we have inherited from the institute of serfdom […] This our view is intimately connected with the convinction, that the evolution of economy can under present conditions take place only in an instinctive way, in the like manner it has hitherto taken place overall in Western Europe, and that the conscious activity of the intelligentsia cannot change the character of this evolution.43

This Marxist argument was a challenge to Mikhailovsky. After all, had not the Narodnik intelligents already since the mid-nineteenth century not insisted on the decisive role of the subjective factor in the Russian revolutionary moment? It was just this “subjectivism” which was the hallmark or Narodnikism and one of the most important points of difference with Marxism. Although Mikhailovsky had grown more critical of the

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Narodnik ideology, he nevertheless was not ready to abandon its fundamental idea of making history by free choices. Again, as in his article of 1877, Mikhailovsky tries to question what he conceives as Marx’s historical determinism. Although he does not identify the Russian Marxists with the “knights of accumulation”, he, however notes that many of them do not want to retard the process of the expropriation of peasants.44 According to Mikhailovsky, Marxian theory, especially the version propagated “in the extensive popular literature”,45 depicts the laws of history as “invincible, irreversible” ones, which act “quite independently of whether some likes or dislikes them”.46 This theory parallels with Darwinism. But, asks Mikhailovsky, in which work Marx has presented the outlines of his materialist conception of history? To refer to Capital is not enough, since it is an analysis of a certain restricted historical mode of production only. Darwin had presented his theory in the Origin of Species, but in Marx we do not find any corresponding work. “The very foundations of the theory of economic materialism, repeated as axioms innumerable times, remain to this day disjected and factually not proved”.47 Thus, at the end of the 1840s, a quite new, materialist and truly scientific understanding of history was invited and announced, which meant for the science of history the same as Darwin’s theory meant for the natural sciences. The difference, however, lies in that Darwin’s theory is supported by an immense mass of factual material, whilst the creators of economic materialism […] were insufficiently informed just of economic history […] Despite of the erudition of its creators, it arose outside of the science and despite of their fight against metaphysics, it came into being in the depths of Hegelian philosophy.48

A modern reader might encounter Mikhailovsky’s critique by noting that such works of Marx and Engels as the texts later known as The German Ideology, where the foundations of historical materialism were sketched, were yet unknown. The juxtaposition of Marx’s work with Darwin was commonplace in the theoretical discourses of the Second International, and in this sense, Mikhailovsky’s misinterpretation of Marx is of course understandable. Moreover, he is quite right in noting that the materialist conception of history was first sketched as a philosophy, rather than a concrete analysis of a given social reality—but one can ask how else it could have been created. Be it as it may, the “philosophical” problem of

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historical necessity is at the core of Mikhailovsky’s analyses, and he has obvious difficulties to cope with it. On the one side, he readily accepts the determinism: “As the reader sees, we not only do not reject the historical necessity, but on the contrary acknowledge its pervasiveness and inevitability. It rules the whole world …”.49 But then comes an unexpected turn: But in reality, no one never takes this for the human mind impossible stance. In reality, as soon as we act in it as living participants, the necessity becomes mitigated with possibility and probability and gets winged by the desirability, although it does not disappear but retains its specific and assigned position in our world-view, and – as I would say – in the influence we have on the world. In its absolute, metaphysical form, the idea of necessity is unusable for the practice of life.50

With these words, Mikhailovsky falls back to the “subjective sociology” of the Russian Narodniks which emerged in the 1860s and to whose founders he himself belonged together with Piotr Lavrov (1823–1900), the Russian friend of Marx and Engels. The “subjective sociology”, later so mercilessly criticised both by Plekhanov and by Lenin, the representants of two currents in Russian Marxism, had got its name from its core methodological idea. It considered the main unit of societies to consist of human personalities; hence the social phenomena should be analysed from an ethical and psychologising point of view, in contrast to the “hard” deterministic methods of natural sciences. By insisting on the role of the “personal factor” in history, the Narodnik theoreticians wanted to defend human freedom, but this was done in a way which actually stipulated the possibility of free choice as a corpus alienum in an otherwise deterministic social theory. In the research literature on Marx’s encounters with the problems of Russia’s development, the main focus has been on the question Mikhailovsky in 1877 and Vera Zasulich in 1881 posed, namely the role of the Russian peasant commune (the obshchina) and its potentialities to form a basis for a future socialist form of society. The difference between the Marxists and the Narodniks is viewed as concerning the path of development of Russia—the Marxists generally have stressed the necessity of a capitalist path of development, the Narodniks have sought the alternative of a kind of—true, rather ill-defined—“peasant socialism”. However,

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Mikhailovsky’s comment quoted just above makes clear, that the difference is deeper than a question of the most suitable development path only, which could have been solved (as Marx himself noted) by a detailed research on concrete facts. Between Narodniks and Marxists, there is a more deep difference which concerns the method of social analysis itself, a difference which cannot be solved empirically, but depends on which philosophical choices have been made. The critique of Russian Marxists, Plekhanov and Lenin, on Mikhailovsky is well known. In his first independent work, What are the Friends of the People…, Lenin characterised Mikhailovsky’s comments to Marx “empty and pretentious babbling”51 and the Narodnik doctrines in general as an expression of the petty-bourgeois mentality of the smallscale producent. Plekhanov, for his part, in his On The Development of Monist View of History calls Mikhailovsky “our worthy subjectivist”, who “could not be a reliable defender of Capital ” even in the article he defended Marx against the critique of Zhukovsky.52 During the Soviet epoch, Mikhailovsky’s theoretical heritage was seldom discussed and the Marxist analyses of his oeuvre usually rested contented with a referee of what Plekhanov and Lenin already had said. However, a more thorough critique of Mikhailovsky’s—and of the whole school of Russian “subjective sociology”—views came from a somewhat unexpected direction. In 1902, in Moscow was published a philosophical pamphlet with the title Problemy idealizma (Problems of Idealism), where several well-known representants of the Russian “Silver Age” philosophers, such as Sergej Bulgakov, Evgeny Trubetskoi, Piotr Struve, Nikolai Berdyaev and others, criticised the materialist and naturalist tendencies in Russian intellectual life. The book was experienced by the Left as an assault against the growing influence of Marxism, and indeed, many of its articles had the Marxist theory as its target. But its scope was broader than Marxism only, and an extensive article by the Ukrainian social scientist of Neo-Kantian orientation Bogdan Kistiakovsky (1868–1920) was dedicated to Mikhailovsky.53 The main focus of Kistiakovsky’s analysis was Mikhailovsky’s concept of “possibility”. Mikhailovsky did not appeal to it only when polemising against Marx and the Marxists; it was actually one of the main ideas of his “subjective sociology” and the whole philosophy of history. The idea implied that it is possible to change the course of history or at least influence it essentially by conscious decisions, and Mikhailovsky did not apply it only on the question whether a capitalist path of development would be necessary for

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Russia. According to him, such choices stood open already in the eighteenth century. Catherine II had the possibility to create a third estate in Russia, which then “possibly would have elevated the banner of freedom and Enlightenment”.54 Kistiakovsky notes that for Mikhailovsky “the possibility has an altogether autonomous meaning; it is given as it is, and so it is quite independent of necessity”.55 In other words, behind Mikhailovsky’s social doctrine lurks an “original theory of knowledge”. He is “grounding his subjective sociology on the categories of necessity and non-necessity, leaning on them as the highest criteria, and, on the other side […] he sees the significance and goal of his subjective method in that it figures out those or these possibilities”.56 This searching for possible ways to of seemingly deterministic situations is in the last instance grounded in Mikhailovsky’s anthropology. In one of his early works he poses the question: “Which is better: to formulate the tasks of the society and the social duties before an investigation of the laws of social phenomena – or to receive them as a result of the investigation?”, and answers: “Of course, it is better to deduce the tasks of the society from the results of the research, if this is possible. But the point is that this question is altogether uncalled-for, since it is characteristic to human nature that she cannot be without introducing a subjective element in a sociological study”.57 Interestingly enough, Mikhailovsky justified this conclusion with an argument which anticipated Dilthey’s famous distinction between human and natural sciences: “Thus, the laws of sociology differ essentially from those of the natural science, where the subjective principle of what is desirable is left at the threshold when inquiry starts”. A “sociologist” (i.e. a social scientist, to use a more current terminology) must, according to Mikhailovsky, say: “I will to know which are the relations between the society and its members; but in addition to the knowing, I will yet the realization of such and such ideals of mine”.58 We see here a clear difference to Marx, who did not yet question the methodological unity of sciences. Marx was convinced that the same determinism which applies to the objects of natural sciences, equally applies to human sciences. True, the “factor of consciousness” and the possibility to see alternatives characterise the human sciences, but in this case, too, men must follow the Baconian maxim Natura non nisi parendo vincitur. This is a dialectical formulation, as it implies that necessities are overcome by following the necessities, i.e. laws of nature. In Mikhailovsky,

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on the other side, necessity and freedom stood against one another, without mediation.

Notes 1. Karl Marx, ‘Letter to Ludwig Kugelmann’, 12 October 1868, in: MECW , vol. 43, London: Lawrence & Wishart 2010, p. 130. 2. “It is not for tailors or cobblers”; op. cit., p. 131. 3. First mention in the article ‘Teorija Marksa i obshchestvennaja nauka’, where Mikhailovsky comments the “sociological consequences” drawn from Marxism by the German zoologist Gustav Jäger (Otechestvennye Zapiski, January 1870). The other articles deal with the relationships of Darwinism to teleological explanations (March 1870), to liberalism (January 1871), followed by ‘Remarks on Darwinism’ in December 1871 and, finally, ‘The Natural Way of Things’ in February 1873. Articles are republished in: N. K. Mikhailovsky, Sochinenija, tom 1, izd. 4-oe, St. Petersburg: Klobukov 1906, pp. 165–348. 4. N. K. Mikhaolovskij, ‘Po povodu russkogo izdanija knigi Karla Marksa’, in: Vestnik Evropy, vol. 4, 1872, p. 176. 5. Op. cit., p. 177. 6. Op. cit., p. 178. 7. [Nikolaj Mikhajlovskij], ‘Po povodu russkogo izdanija knigi Karla Marksa’, in: Otechestvennye zapiski, No. 4, 1872, p. 182. 8. N. V. Shelgunov, ‘Rabochij proletariat v Anglii i vo Frantsii’, in: Sovremennik, No. 11, 1861, p. 136. Quoted here according to A. L. Reuel, Russkaja ekonomicheskaja mysl’ 60—70-kh godov XIX veka i marksizm, Moskva: Gos. izd. politicheskoj literatury 1956, p. 196. Reuel remarks (loc. cit.), that in the second edition of Shelgunov’s collected works (Sochinenija, vol. 1, 1895) this passage has been deleted, since “in the beginning of the [18]90s N. V. Shelgunov had rejected his earlier views concerning the special path of the historical process in Russia”. 9. Marx to Engels, 3 August 1870, in: MECW , vol. 44, London: Lawrence & Wishart 2010, p. 33. 10. ‘Engels to Marx’, 29 November 1873, in: MECW , vol. 44, p. 539. 11. [Nikolaj Mikhajlovskij], ‘Po povodu russkogo izdanija knigi Karla Marksa’, in: Otechestvennye zapiski, No. 4, 1872, p. 183. 12. [Nikolai Mikhailovsky], op. cit., p. 184. 13. Reuel, op. cit., p. 245. 14. ‘Marx to Nikolai Danielson’, 15 November 1878, in: MECW , vol. 45, pp. 343—344. 15. ‘Marx to Nikolai Danielson’, 28 November 1878, op. cit., p. 346.

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16. Nikolaj Ziber, ‘Neskol’ko zamechanij po povody stat’i g. Ju. Zhukovskogo “Karl Marks i ego kniga o kapitale”’, in: Otechestvennye Zapiski, No. 11, 1877. 17. See MECW , vol. 35, p. 17. 18. N. K. Mikhailovsky, ‘Karl Marks pered sudom g. Ju. Zhukovskogo’, in: N. K. Mikhaolovskij, Sochinenija, vol. 4, St. Peterburg: Vol’f 1897, columns 167–168. 19. Op. cit., col. 169. 20. Op. cit., col. 170. 21. Op. cit., coll. 170–171. 22. This passage from the original 1867 edition does not appear in the English translations, which all base on subsequent editions. Here the German original: “Wenn auf dem Kontinent von Europa der Einfluss der kapitalistischen Produktion, welche die Menschenrace unterwühlt durch Ueberarbeit, Theilung der Arbeit, Unterjochung unter die Maschine, Verkrüpplung des unreifen und weiblichen Körpers, schlechtes Leben u.s.w., sich, wie bisher, Hand in Hand entwickelt mit der Konkurrenz in Grösse der nationalen Soldateska, Staatsschulden, Steuern, eleganter Kriegsführung u.s.w., möchte die vom Halbrussen und ganzen Moskowiter Herzen (dieser Belletrist hat nebenbei bemerkt seine Entdeckungen über den „russischen “Kommunismus nicht in Russland gemacht, sondern in dem Werke des preussischen Regierungsraths Haxthausen) so ernst prophezeite Verjüngung Europa’s durch die Knute und obligate Infusion von Kalmückenblut schliesslich doch unvermeidlich werden”. 23. Op. cit., coll. 171–172. 24. Op. cit., coll. 172–173. 25. Op. cit., coll. 173–176. 26. Op. cit., col. 178. 27. Op. cit., col. 184. 28. Karl Marx, Capital , vol. I, in: MECW , vol. 35, p. 9. 29. Op. cit., p. 10. 30. Mikhailovsky, op. cit., col. 185. 31. Op. cit., col. 186. 32. Op. cit., col. 186. 33. Op. cit., col. 187. 34. Mikhailovsky does not mention the title of the brochure, but obviously refers to von Sybel’s Die Lehren des heutigen Socialismus und Communismus, Bonn: Max Cohen & Son, 1872. 35. Mikhailovsky, op. cit., col. 194. 36. Mikhailovsky, op. cit., col. 206. 37. Karl Marx, ‘Letter to Otechestvennye Zapiski’, in: MECW , vol. 24, p. 196, but re-translated from the French original by me.

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38. Karl Marx, Capital , vol. I, in: MECW , vol. 35, London: Lawrence & Wishart 2010, p. 15. 39. Karl Marx, ‘Letter to Otechestvennye Zapiski’, in: MECW , vol. 24, p. 199; re-translated from the French original by me. 40. MECW , vol. 24, p. 199. 41. Kalrl Marx, ‘Letter to Vera Zasulich’, 8. March 1881, in: MECW , vol. 24, pp. 370, 371. 42. V. P. Vorontsov, Sud’by kapitalizma v Rossii, St. Peterburg 1882. 43. N. K. Mikhailovsky, ‘Literatura i zhizn’, in: Russkoe bogatstvo, No. 1, 1894, p. 99. 44. Op. cit., pp. 101, 102. 45. Op. cit., p. 105. 46. Op. cit., p. 104. 47. Op. cit., p. 106. 48. Op. cit., pp. 107–108. 49. Op. cit., p. 114. 50. Op. cit., p. 114. 51. V. I. Lenin, ‘What the “Friends of the People” Are…’, in: Lenin, Collected Works, Moscow: Progress Publishers 1977, p. 162. 52. G. V. Plekhanov, ‘The Development of the Monist View of History’, in: G. V. Plekhanov (ed.), Selected Philosophical Works in Five Volumes, vol. I, Moscow: Progress Publishers 1974, p. 664. 53. B. A. Kistjakovskij,”Russkaja sotsiologicheskaja shkola” i kategorija vozmozhnosti pri reshenii sotsial’no-eticheskikh problem, in: Problemy idealizma [1902], Moskva: Modest Kolerov 2010, pp. 343–451. 54. Quotation here according to Kistjakovskij, op. cit., p. 362. 55. Kistjakovskij, op. cit., p. 363. 56. Kistjakovskij, op. cit., p. 366. 57. Kistjakovskij, op. cit., p. 367; quotation from Mikhailovsky, ‘Filosofija istorii Lui Blanka’, in: N. K. Mikhailovsky, Sochinenija, vol. III, St. Peterburg: Vol’f 1897, p. 10. 58. Kistjakovskij, op. cit., p. 369; quotation from Mikhailovsky, ‘Ob istine, sovershenstve i drugikh skuchnykh veshchakh’, in: Sochinenija, vol. III, pp. 405–406.

CHAPTER 3

Marx’s Theory of Ideology—From Its Enlightenment Roots to Russian Discussions

Marx’s theory of ideology belongs to the controversial part of his theoretical heritage. Marx himself wrote only little about the subject and never developed a detailed theory of ideology. This has not prevented the following generations of Marxists to develop their own views based on the disjecta membra of Marx’s statements concerning ideology. The interpretations of what Marx “really said” about ideology are varying and even conflicting. Among the theoreticians of the II International, there was a tendency to identify the concept of “ideology” with the concept of “world outlook” (Weltanschauung ). It was argued that the working class has a world outlook of its own, which bases on science. Consequently, a scientific world outlook of the working class was not only possible, but preferable. However, if the concepts of world outlook and ideology are identified, this gives the result that a scientific ideology would be possible, too. Indeed, the word “ideology” was used exactly in this sense by the Bolsheviks and in the later Soviet Marxism. But this contradicts Marx’s own views. Although his comments on what ideology is are sparse, he nevertheless clearly constated that he understands with ideology something illusory, that is, a kind of false consciousness. In Western Marxism, a competing theory of ideology was created by Louis Althusser in the 1960s. Its basic idea was to view ideology as a material force, rooted in institutions, which shape men’s consciousness. This theory was developed by Althusser with the goal to get out of the © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 V. Oittinen, Marx’s Russian Moment, Marx, Engels, and Marxisms, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-29662-8_3

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impasses of the concept of ideology prevalent in Marxism–Leninism and embraced by his French Communist party, too. However, Althusser’s theory creates problems of its own, and in addition it clearly does not follow Marx’s own intentions. True, Althusser accepted Marx’s position that ideology is an illusory form of consciousness. But because he at the same time emphasised the status of ideology as a real, material force, he nolens volens had to accept the paradox that ideology, although false, nevertheless is in some way real. This is not a trivial paradox, but forces us to face vexing epistemological problems. It is interesting to note, that the Russian Marxists encountered the same problems already in the beginning of the twentieth century, as Aleksandr Bogdanov sketched an ideology theory which had many similarities with that of Althusser. Which meaning, then, did Marx himself put in his concept of ideology? I start here from the assumption (which indeed is well-founded and can be backed with references) that the roots of Marx’s theory of ideology are to be found in the Enlightenment discourse on prejudices. For the Enlightenment materialist thinkers, such as Paul Thiry d’Holbach and Claude-Adrien Helvétius, the oppressive system of the pre-revolutionary French ancien régime was built upon the ignorance and false ideas of the masses. Marx, of course, cannot accept the blatant un-historicity of this view, but he concurs with his Enlightenment predecessors when he sees the origin and the convincing power of ideologies in the illusory promises of universality of the values upon which the society should be founded. The importance of Hegel for Marxism is generally accepted, while Marx’s debt to the Enlightenment tradition has not received the attention it deserves. This neglect is especially glaring in respect of theory of ideology. And yet we do not find in Hegel any such theory of illusions or prejudices which would serve as a starting point for Marx, while this problematics was one of the main themes in the discourses of the eighteenth-century French thinkers. True, already Plekhanov underlined the significance of the Enlightenment materialism for Marx so early as in an article of 1893, where he presented Helvétius and Holbach, both “in many respect outstanding thinkers who have not been duly appreciated to this day”, as direct precursors of Marx.1 However, even Plekhanov saw the main positive contribution of Enlightenment philosophy in its materialist explanation of the world. With the “sociologist” attitude so typical for him, he did not consider closer another aspect of Enlightenment materialism, namely its epistemological ideas. They are of relevance for a theory of ideology insofar, as especially Helvétius’ and Holbach’s critique

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of prejudices clearly continues themes we know already from Spinoza. For Spinoza, the attaining of truth is a continuous process from inadequate to ever more adequate ideas. The inadequacy of ideas is, according to Spinoza, due to that they are fragmented and mutilated, that is, suffer from a lack. Hence Spinoza’s striking formulation: “Falsity consists of the privation of knowledge, which is involved in inadequate, or mutilated and confused ideas” (Eth. II. prop. 35). The French materialists were adherents of a sensualist epistemology and differed in this respect from Spinoza, but their explanation of the origin of the prejudices and illusions was based on the same principle as in Spinoza. They viewed the prejudices as caused by passions; that is, the prejudices, as erroneous ideas, did not contain anything “positive”. For Holbach, the truth was the real saviour of humanity, because it shows men their real interests: “This truth proves to them [to the people] the futlity of a politics whose principle is to deceive the people, to get them to serve the priests and to give to the priests the exclusive right to instruct, or rather to blind them”.2 It is true, continues Holbach, that the men seem to “adore the lie”, but this is possible only because the false ideas have acquired “the apparency of truth”.3 No one adores falsity because of its falsity, because the falsity is in itself nothing; it is but a privation. In what follows, I will first sketch Marx’s theory of ideology starting from its Enlightenment precursors. I examine then Althusser’s alternative ideology theory, which can be interpreted as a break with the emancipatory aspirations of Enlightenment and has little, if any, in common with Marx. Finally, I will show that the “Althusserian alternative” was present already in the early theoretical disputes of the Russian Bolsheviks, and in this sense, Althusser’s concept of ideology is not so original as many seem to think.

The Enlightenment Roots of “Ideology” The word “ideology” appeared in Marx’s vocabulary in 1845–1846, as he and Friedrich Engels were working on manuscripts later referred to as The German Ideology. It was still at this time a rather new term, coined at the end of the previous century by the late Enlightenment thinker Destutt de Tracy (1754–1836) and his colleagues (Pierre-Jean Cabanis, 1757–1808, Maine de Biran, 1766–1828, Volney, 1757–1829, and others). These thinkers, soon to be known as “ideologues”,4 formed a group which can be characterised as intellectuals of the post-Thermidorian Directoire.

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This was the government of the Girondist fraction, which had emerged as victorious from the revolution. In accordance with the intermediate position which the Girondist liberals had between the adherents of the old regime and the radical masses in the course of the revolution, the ideologues struggled on two fronts. They denounced both the authority of religion so dear for the ancien régime and the radicalism of the Jacobins. As an antidote to what they viewed as extremisms on the right and on the left, the ideologues recommended the middle way of a strictly scientific approach. They sketched a programme for a new system of high schools (écoles speciales ) which was intended to replace the old feodal universities. As Jonathan Israel constates in his recent book on the history of Enlightenment, “the overriding aim” of this education reform was to “to forge an enlightened elite sufficiently scornful of the ordinary [people] to resist every populist pressure” at the same time it guaranteed the progress of sciences.5 The ideologues represented thus a position one could call “scientistic”, in that they believed in an impartial science, the pursuit of which would lead to the realisation of the Enlightenment programme: equality, justice and well-being for all. In accordance with this, the ideologues aimed at a scientific explanation of the origin of the ideas which direct the conduct of men in society. At a first glance, this seems to coincide with the new materialist conception of history that Marx and Engels were developing in the mid-1840s, since the ideologists, too, were critical of all metaphysics and attempted a “real”, empirical explanation of the role of mental phenomena in social life. However, the concept of Destutt de Tracy’s group had, from the viewpoint of Marx, several flaws, which rendered its analysis of society insufficient. The French ideologues continued in their theory of cognition the programme of eighteenthcentury materialist and sensualist Enlightenment philosophy in France as it was expounded especially by Claude-Adrien Helvétius and Étienne Bonnot de Condillac. As a consequence, they built their theory upon a naturalistic notion of Man: the origin of ideas was deduced directly from the nature of human sensuality, without a sufficient social mediation. In fact, Destutt de Tracy stated expressly that nothing else should be understood by “ideology” but a continuation of the physiology of the senses. This vulgar-materialistic conviction had later a career of its own during the so-called Materialismusstreit in Germany in mid-nineteenth century,

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culminating in the famous assertion of Ludwig Büchner (1824–1899) that “the brain produces thoughts in like manner the kidneys produce urine”.

Problems with the Enlightenment View The emphasis the French ideologues laid on the crucial role of the senses was, as a philosophical viewpoint, parallel to the sensualistic anthropology of Ludwig Feuerbach (1804–1872), whose new “philosophy of the future” Marx and Engels were at the time criticising for its lack of historical and social dimensions. Because of this parallelity, Marx’s critique of the older materialism does not hit only Feuerbach. We see this especially in Marx’s third Thesis on Feuerbach (1845): “The materialist doctrine concerning the changing of circumstances and upbringing forgets that circumstances are changed by men and that the educator must himself be educated”.6 The reference can here be as well to Feuerbach as to Helvétius, who in his De l’Homme (1759) famously had declared that man is completely a result of education. As Marx’s third thesis makes explicit, there are problems with the materialist Enlightenment anthropology, which had found its continuation both in the theory of the ideologues and in Feuerbach. Two main problems can be mentioned. First, the French materialists, although they were well aware of the influence of material interests on people’s opinions, viewed the question of illusory ideas only from an un-historical “anthropological” stance; thus, Helvétius thought that “the illusion is a necessary effect of the passions, the force of whose is measured almost always by the degree of the blindness to which they throw us”.7 We can pick up the second problem, too, from the writings of the same Helvétius. As just mentioned, he claimed that man is nothing but a product of his upbringing.8 Marx was critical towards this tradition of Enlightenment anthropology, because it forgot that people even change the circumstances. In other words, the Enlightenment materialism forgets—or at least belittles—the capacity of a person as the subject of his own actions. Marx’s third Feuerbach thesis thus gives an important methodological hint about how the role of ideology in social life should be understood. Ideas are not only a mechanical reflection of “circumstances” (i.e. the material life). For Marx as a materialist, ideas are of course not independent entities, but they nevertheless play their part in the constitution of

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human subjectivity, which in turn, as a material force, is able to exert influence on the “circumstances”. It is not ideas which change the world, but people who have ideas; this is the credo of Marx’s new, non-reductionist materialism, which does not loses sight of the human subject, the agent. A third problem with the Enlightenment materialism is maybe the most crucial from the new, proletarian viewpoint Marx and Engels had assumed in the mid-1840s. The materialist tradition of the Enlightenment criticised, quite justifiably, the prejudices of men as irrational. The prejudices stemmed, according to them, from the fact that men did not know their real interests. Paul Thiry d’Holbach expressed this view in a succinct manner. He wrote in his anonymous pamphlet Essai sur les préjugées (1770), a book which was held scandalous at the time it was published, that people “will never err when they direct their judgements according to the permanent utility which follows their ways to think and act. Following this eternal, invariable, necessary rule, they will judge soundly all things; their minds will have a reliable guide on which they can for ever attach their ideas”.9 For Holbach, it is the utility of ideas, i.e. when they assist us in our self-preservation, which is the main criterion of their rationality. The sentiments of men, too, and not only abstract ideas are always reasonable when “the affection and veneration of men is directed towards objecs which are truly useful”.10 However, Holbach and the other Enlightenment materialists, including the ideologues, interpreted the interests of men in a naturalist manner. They of course could not be without noticing gross social inequalities of their age, but all this misery was only a consequence of ignorance, for example in countries like Spain, of which Holbach writes with indignation: “In those countries, superstition and despotism has brought Man to lose his nature”.11 One needs only to introduce the true Enlightenment, and “soon it will emerge a new race of men, who will serve their fatherland, and will have science, activity, industry…”.12 All social conflicts thus seemed to be solvable on the basis of the common rationality of all men, which was an expression of their “nature”. The popular Marxist literature has mostly depicted the Enlightenment as a “bourgeois” form of thought, maybe historically progressive at this stage, but nevertheless bourgeois. Such a view is difficult to make to fit with the fact that Marx and Engels found in this naturalism a strain which foreshadows communism. They noted in their first joint publication in 1845, The Holy Family (which they completed some months before starting to write The German Ideology) that “just as Cartesian materialism

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passes into natural science proper, the other trend of French materialism leads directly to socialism and communism”.13 This is an assertion which of course must be taken cum grano salis. Because the Enlightenment thinkers supported a naturalistic anthropology, the socialism and communism one might deduce from their writings could not be otherwise than ahistorical and utopistic, a Communism for “Man in general”. Nevertheless, we should be cautious and not reduce the Enlightenment into a purely bourgeois, liberal or pro-capitalist mode of thinking—a tendency which yet today occurs among Marxist scholars.14 An important consequence of Marx’s new materialism is the manner in which the irreducibility of the subject as the material bearer of human agency renders the question of interpretation into the orbit of a theory of ideology. For Marx, ideas are not mechanical reflections of external phenomena in the minds of social agents, but their reception always contains an interpretative moment. From this it naturally follows that ideological constructions are, respectively, liable to their rendition. Ideologies are not “given”, but born and reborn in the interpretative activity of the subjects.

Ideology as Mental Production A further novelty in The German Ideology in comparison to the Enlightenment theories of prejudices was that the emergence of an ideology was connected with the division of labour into material and mental. The idea of a division of labour as a moving force of historical progress was in itself of Enlightenment origin. Marx and Engels applied here the ideas developed by Adam Smith (1723–1790) and his Scottish compatriot Adam Ferguson (1723–1813). Indeed, many passages in Marx’s and Engels’ manuscript read like direct excerpts from the works of the Scottish enlighteners. As for Smith and Ferguson, so even for Marx and Engels, the fountainhead of social progress lies in the ever-deepening division of labour, which creates more and more specialisation, new professions and new consumer needs. This view is materialistic insofar as it rejects the influence of divine providence and sees the course of human history as being determined by the division of labour. Originally, the division of labour is “nothing but the division of labour in the sexual act, then that division of labour which develops spontaneously or ‘naturally’ by virtue of natural predisposition (e.g. physical strength), needs, accidents, etc. etc”. From these initial forms, the social

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structure develops towards an ever-higher complexity, until a decisive distinction arises: Division of labour only becomes truly such from the moment when a division of material and mental labour appears. (The first form of ideologists, priests, is concurrent.) From this moment onwards consciousness can really flatter itself that it is something other than consciousness of existing practice, that it really represents something without representing something real; from now on consciousness is in a position to emancipate itself from the world and to proceed to the formation of ‘pure’ theory, theology, philosophy, ethics, etc. But even if this theory, theology, philosophy, ethics, etc. comes into contradiction with the existing relations, this can only occur because existing social relations have come into contradiction with existing forces of production …15

Noteworthy in this passage is that Marx sees the possibility of ideology from the division of labour into material and mental, and even mention “priests” as the first ideologists. But he does not speak about ideological institutions as part of ideology itself. We have all reason to interpret Marx here so that ideology is for him a mental phenomenon. Fourteen years later, in 1859, Marx presents in the foreword to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy his famous metaphor of basis and superstructure, which repeats and summarises what he already had written in The German Ideology: “The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness”.16 This passage is later often understood as if the “superstructure” (Überbau) would be the same as ideology. That this cannot be the case is clear from the fact that Marx distinguishes in 1859 the superstructure from corresponding “definite forms of consciousness”. In other words, the institutions constituting the superstructure—schools, lawsuits, prisons, churches etc.—are material structures. They serve as material support for an ideology, but the ideology itself, as a form of thought, is of course not material. To turn attention to this fact seems by no means to be unnecessary hair-splitting, since in many fashionable versions of Marxism the ideology indeed is identified, at least tendentially, with the material structures of society. I will soon deal with them more below when I discuss Althusser’s theory of ideology. Let us, however, first note one significant consequence of the

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division of labour: it not only leads to the rise of productivity, but creates new contradictions in society: [T]hese three moments, the forces of production, the state of society, and consciousness, can and must come into contradiction with one another, because the division of labour implies the possibility, nay the fact that intellectual and material activity – enjoyment and labour, production and consumption – devolve on different individuals, and that the only possibility of their not coming into contradiction lies in the negation in its turn of the division of labour.17

This is a point where Marx differed from the optimistic view of many Enlightenment thinkers on the division of labour, since he saw it not only as the origin of progress, but as the origin of alienation, too: it leads to a fixation of the social activity of individual people into certain niches, which are very difficult to escape. However, the alienation was a theme already in Rousseau, so that even here, Marx remains in the orbit of Enlightenment thought.18 A most important moment and the direct cause of the emergence of an ideological illusority is the fact that the division of labour creates a “contradiction between the interest of the separate individual or the individual family and the communal interest of all individuals who have intercourse with one another”. Although the “communal interest” (gemeinschaftliche Interesse) of people does exist in the form of a mutual interdependence between members of society, the division of labour results in the ruling elite being able to present its particular interests as a common interest of all people.19 The “common interest” has thus a tendency to become illusory in class-based societies, and it is in this tension between the real and illusory common interests of men where ideology arises. The logic of class struggle is that every class which aims at domination in society must be able to present its own interests as being the general interests of humanity. But actually, the struggle for the particular class interests “constantly run[s] counter to the common and illusory common interests”, which “necessitates practical intervention and restraint by the illusory ‘general’ interest in the form of the state”.20 It would be wrong to interpret the “ideological moment” as a trait of inadequate or false thinking in general. If we were to call all inadequate thinking “ideology”, we would not grasp its specifics, since even in the sciences, inadequate ideas occur (which, however, will be overcome as the enquiry progresses).21

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Ideology and Fetishism Are Different Things A common misconception in the discussions on Marx’s theory of ideology is connected to the camera obscura theme. He wrote in The German Ideology: If in all ideology men and their circumstances appear upside-down as in a camera obscura, this phenomenon arises just as much from their historical life-process as the inversion of objects on the retina does from their physical life-process.22

It would be easy to interpret these words as if saying that the ideological thinking and the propensity to see the reality upside-down are more or less the same thing. This, however, cannot be the case. As we already saw, the essence of ideology lies in its class character: it depicts, in an illusory manner, the particular interests of a certain class as general human interests. The camera obscura theme, on the contrary, covers a much wider field of illusions, which do not need to have a class character. The idea of camera obscura is clearly borrowed from Feuerbach. It does not occur at all in the tradition of French materialism, which reduces the origin of erroneous ideas to the influence of passions and interests on our judgement. In his critique of religion, Feuerbach debunks the concept of God as a result of human alienation, which leads men to perceive their life world in an illusory manner. In his Preliminary Theses Concerning the Reformation of Philosophy (1842), published one year after the main work of his religious criticism, Essence of Christianity, Feuerbach extends the method of detecting the camera obscura mechanism from the field of religion to other areas of human history, accusing not only theology, but even speculative philosophy of turning the real relations in the world upside-down. The way in which this mechanism works consists, when it all boils down, in the fact that subject and predicate change places. So the overcoming of alienation was for Feuerbach in principle an easy task, requiring only a radical changing of one’s way of thinking: “We must only make the predicat into a subject […] – that is, only turn up the speculative philosophy, and so we do have the undisclosed, pure, lucid truth”.23 Marx did not believe that alienation and the phenomenon of camera obscura can be overcome by a simple reformation of philosophy. From the 1860s on, he developed in Capital the theory of commodity fetishism, which develops further the camera obscura theme he had touched in The

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German Ideology. The question of ideological illusion changes accordingly, manifestly in two aspects. On the one side, the “ideologists” are now represented above all by the vulgar economists; on the other side, the illusions of the capitalist way of production find their material cause in commodity fetishism. The analysis of fetishism in Capital , Volume I, had already been preceded by Marx’s studies on the history of political economy. In the Grundrisse of 1857–1858, Marx turned his attention to the fact that in modern bourgeois society, “individuals are ruled by abstractions, whereas previously [i.e. in pre-capitalist societies] they were dependent on one another”. As a consequence, Marx continues, philosophers have seen the peculiarity of modern times in the individuals’ being dominated by ideas, and have identified the birth of free individuality with the overthrow of this domination of ideas. From the ideological standpoint, this mistake was the easier to make because that domination of relationships (that objective dependence, which, incidentally is in its turn transformed into certain personal relationships of dependence, only divested of all illusion) appears in the consciousness of individuals themselves to be the rule of ideas, and the belief in the eternal validity of these ideas, i.e. of those objective relationships of dependence, is of course in every way reinforced, sustained, drummed into people by the ruling classes.24

Marx soon came to specify who were the protagonists of the “ideological standpoint”. The texts he jotted down in 1862–1863 and which were later published by Kautsky under the somewhat misleading name Theories of Surplus Value, contain a survey of different writers on political economy from the seventeenth century onwards. Marx made here the famous distinction between classical and vulgar political economy. The classical writers, up to Adam Smith and David Ricardo, still tried to grasp the essence of the capitalist mode of production, and were not scared by the contradictions they encountered. The representatives of the vulgar economy, on the other side, were already anxious to “save” the theory of capitalist economy from its incongruities. For Marx, the vulgar scientists had already taken stance for capitalism, when they took the fetishist illusions of the bourgeois mode of production for real, for example, when they asserted that capital yields profit thanks to its own intrinsic potency (and not, because it usurps unpaid labour). As Isabelle Garo notes, because of the analysis of this apologetic function, the Theories of Surplus Value of the early 1860s can be seen as a kind of continuation

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of the ideology theory of the 1840s in The German Ideology, and the theory of the intellectuals sketched in the 1840s is now applied to the representatives of the political economy.25 In capitalism, production is above all the production of commodities, and the relations between people, both in production and consumption, are thus mediated by commodities. As a consequence, social relations appear as relations between things. When a worker sells their labour force to the capitalist, this appears as an action of selling and buying a commodity (the labour force) between two equal partners and conceals its real social content (the exploitation of the worker by the capitalist). The famous passage in Capital , Volume I (1867), where Marx most fully developed—in a published form—his theory of fetishism, reads: … the existence of the things quâ commodities, and the value relation between the products of labour which stamps them as commodities, have absolutely no connection with their physical properties and with the material relations arising therefrom. There it is a definite social relation between men, that assumes, in their eyes, the fantastic form of a relation between things. In order, therefore, to find an analogy, we must have recourse to the mist-enveloped regions of the religious world. In that world the productions of the human brain appear as independent beings endowed with life, and entering into relation both with one another and the human race. So it is in the world of commodities with the products of men’s hands. This I call the Fetishism which attaches itself to the products of labour, so soon as they are produced as commodities, and which is therefore inseparable from the production of commodities.26

In this passage, Marx openly reverted to the Feuerbachian motive of the camera obscura and drew a parallel between his critique of the illusions which the capitalist mode of production creates and Feuerbach’s critique of religion. As, according to Feuerbach, the false, alienated consciousness produces religious illusions, so the mode of production in which people seem to be in social contact only via the commodity market leads, in Marx, to fetishistic illusions. It is important to note that this fetishism has an “objective” character, since it necessarily follows from the production of commodities. The false assumptions created by fetishism are thus not deliberately or intentionally created in order to “cheat” people, but arise spontaneously. Marx made this quite clear. For example, when the English socialist writer Thomas Hodgskin attacked some concepts of bourgeois economists and

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quite rightly perceived their fetishistic character, Marx approved, but continued: … Hodgskin regards this as a pure subjective illusion which conceals the deceit and the interests of the ruling classes. He does not see that the way of looking at things arises out of the actual relation itself; the latter is not an expression of the former, but vice versa.27

But despite the fact that the illusion is produced “objectively”, this does not lend support to the claim that the illusion itself has some kind of independent existence. Without going here into philosophical subtleties, one can say that Marx adheres here to the long realist and materialist tradition in philosophy going back, as already mentioned, to Aristotle, which maintains that it is of course the interpreter, the human subject, who creates the illusion; commodity production creates only the preconditions for illusory forms of thought. There is thus a connection between Marx’s theory of ideology and his idea of the commodity fetishism. But we would make a mistake if we put equation marks between these two doctrines. Fetishism is, as Marx wrote, “inseparable from the production of commodities” in general and it concerns both capitalists and workers in like manner. Ideology differs from mere fetishism in that it has an apologetic function. It tries to influence men’s mind by suggesting that the particular interests of their exploiters in fact are general human interests. In fetishism, there is no such kind of “false generality” concerning the interests. Thus, the apology does not consist of the commodity fetishism in itself. Instead, it consists of the fact that the “surface” phenomena of capitalist economy are taken as expressing their essence. In other words, the deceptive form in which these surface phenomena are mediated through the prism of commodity fetishism, becomes a tool for ideology.28 Ideology makes use of the fetishism. Exactly in this sense the vulgar economists take for a given the fetishising surface appearance of bourgeois production relations. This category was anticipated already in Marx’s analysis of Proudhon in 1847, where he wrote about the “metaphysics of Political Economy”29 and constated that “[e]conomists express the relations of bourgeois production, the division of labour, credit, money, etc. as fixed immutable, eternal categories […] Economists explain how production takes place in the above mentioned relations, but what they do not explain is how these

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relations themselves are produced”.30 Twenty years later, in Capital , the functions of vulgar economy found their exhaustive description: … vulgar economy, which deals with appearances only, ruminates without ceasing on the materials long since provided by scientific economy, and there seeks plausible explanations of the most obtrusive phenomena, for bourgeois daily use, but for the rest, confines itself to systematising in a pedantic way, and proclaiming for everlasting truths, the trite ideas held by the self-complacent bourgeoisie with regard to their own world, to them the best of all possible worlds.31

Marx stressed that the vulgar economy has played its ideological role in the service of bourgeois class relations, especially after the social role of the bourgeoisie changed at the beginning of the nineteenth century. From a revolutionary class fighting feudalism, the bourgeoisie turned increasingly into a main pillar of the establishment. The role of political economy changed accordingly. “It was henceforth no longer a question whether this theorem or that was true, but whether it was useful to capital or harmful, expedient or inexpedient, politically dangerous or not. Pure, selfless research gave way to battles between hired scribblers, and genuine scientific research was replaced by the bad conscience and the evil intent of apologetic” (Capital I).32 The hallmark of vulgar economy is thus that it is more an ideology than a science. Significantly, the founder of the term “ideology”, Destutt de Tracy, again pops up here in Marx’s range of vision, this time as an economist— after all, the fourth and fifth parts of his Elements of Ideology dealt with economic questions. In the second volume of Capital , Marx dedicated some pages to Destutt’s theory of reproduction.33 Marx’s tone is thoroughly ironic. He called him “that very distinguished writer’” and “in a way a lumen [light] among the vulgar economists”. Destutt reduced the whole of society into a “continuous series of exchanges” and was quite unable to see the antagonisms of capitalist production. Marx noted already in the first volume of Capital , that when Tracy spoke of exchange, he called it “an admirable transaction, in which both contracting parties always do benefit”.34 Instead of commenting, Marx simply placed an exclamation mark in parentheses after quoting the passage. To maintain, like Destutt de Tracy, that when, for example, the worker sells their labour force to an entrepreneur, both contracting parties always benefit, is in fact a highly ideologically charged assertion, since it alleges that there exists

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a common interest for both contracting parties as economic agents. In short, Destutt de Tracy identified the particular interests of the bourgeoisie with the general interests of society, thus giving expression to what Marx called “bourgeois cretinism”.35 It is quite clear that the creator of the term “ideology” was himself an ideologist in the negative sense which Marx gave to the term.36

Ideology After Marx One must say that the sketch of a theory of ideology given in The German ideology of 1845–1846 remained a draft only, although it already is an important step forward from the positions of the “old materialism” inherited from the Enlightenment thinkers. Above all, Marx did not dwell upon the problem of how the material presuppositions actually influence or determine the ideological forms. Is the influence causal, i.e. are the material presuppositions the cause, and the ideological forms the effect? On the other hand, if ideological forms are the result of an interpretation of how matters stand, they thus seem to include a moment of free choice. This is an ambiguity in the original ideology theory of Marx which has embarrassed later generations of Marxists. Engels was already forced, in his old age, to try to patch up this deficit in the materialistic concept of history created by his comrade-in-arms. In Socialism: Utopian and Scientific (1880), Engels is content to restate the formulations of The German Ideology from 1845 in an almost unchanged form: “The economic structure of society always furnishes the real basis; it is in starting from this alone that we can work out the ultimate explanation of the whole superstructure of juridical and political institutions as well as of the religious, philosophical, and other ideas of a given historical period”.37 But this explanation still remained too general. Seven years later, in the article “Lawyers’ Socialism” (1887), which Engels wrote with Karl Kautsky, we find the well-known formulation: “Marx helped it to do that with his materialist conception of history, by providing the proof that all man’s juristic, political, philosophical, religious and other ideas are derived in the last resort from his economic conditions of life, from his mode of production and of exchanging the product”.38 Thus, the ideological forms are “derived” from the economic conditions of life, but only “in the last resort” (in letzter Instanz). This expression seems to be the only bulwark which Engels and Kautsky were

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able to erect against the threat of a vulgar, reductionistic materialism interpreting ideas as direct causal products of material processes. The root of the problem obviously lies in an unreflected-on and too general use of the idea of causality, which has not been resolved in a satisfactory manner in the Marxist tradition since Engels’ days. Much later, in the 1960s, Louis Althusser quite justly noted this sore point in the discussions around Marxist ideology theory and tried to develop his own answer to it. I will soon comment Althusser’s solution more in depth below, but already here it can be said that there would have stood a further option than that which Althusser and his followers have chosen, namely to revert to the fact that there is an interpretative moment in all ideology. Ideology is created in the moment of interpretation, and thus it presupposes a subject who judges. Maybe this comment sounds trivial; it is, however, strange that in the endless discussions of Marxists on the relations between basis and superstructure, no one seems to have taken note that if we see ideologies as constituted in the judgements men make, the whole question of the “causal relations” between basis and superstructure becomes obsolete. Although the initial definitions Marx gave to the concept of ideology seem clear enough, if sketchy, “ideology” nevertheless remains one of the most polysemantic terms in the intellectual tradition of Marxism.39 One of the main reasons for the divergences is the simple fact that The German Ideology, with its crucial passages giving the main contours of a theory of ideology, was published only in 1932, almost a century after it had been written. Until then, in the Marxism of the Second International, other uses of the term “ideology” had already succeeded in putting down roots before Marx’s original intentions became known. This cannot be the place to discuss in detail the complicated history of different interpretations of Marxian ideology theory. However, I think that it is important to note two lines along which the concept of ideology has developed in the Marxist tradition since the death of Marx and Engels. These lines were formulated in an especially distinct manner in the polemics carried out among the Russian revolutionaries, to the extent that any discussion concerning the Marxist concept of ideology remains incomplete if this “Russian aspect” is not taken into account. The first line or tendency concerns the inappropriate identification of the concepts of “ideology” and “world outlook”. In the Second International and later in Soviet Marxism, the original critical function of Marx’s concept of ideology—that it essentially is a form of inadequate knowledge—was largely forgotten. Partly this was undoubtedly due to the fact,

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that such a text as The German Ideology, where Marx and Engels had discussed their concept of ideology with more depth, was not published until the 1930s. Be it as it may, the general tendency was to equate “ideology” with the idea of a world outlook (Weltanschauung), a concept with positive content. This was done despite the express views of Marx and Engels. In Anti-Dühring, Engels had spoken of the “communist world outlook championed by Marx and me”,40 that is, of “modern materialism” which was “no longer a philosophy at all, but simply a world outlook which has to establish its validity”.41 Engels made a clear distinction between this kind of world outlook and the “ideology” to which Dühring fell a prey, for example when he characterises Dühring’s aprioristic speculations as “pure ideology, the deduction of reality not from itself but from a concept”.42 True, the concept of a world outlook is introduced by Engels in the late 1870s during his polemics against Dühring, and Marx does not discuss it in his work. However, this cannot be seen as a deviation from the original theory of ideology sketched by them in The German Ideology. It goes without saying that if the concept of “ideology” is reserved for a negative characterisation of inadequate knowledge utilised for apologetic goals, the positive forms of knowledge are in need of a concept of their own. As Wolfgang Fritz Haug notes, it is “misleading to believe that ‘world outlook’ would in itself be […] something one could avoid”.43 On the contrary, to work for a scientific and emancipatory world outlook is a necessity for the proletariat, if it will forestall the pitfalls of ideological illusions. Scientific world outlook “means for Marx and Engels […] nothing else but the revolutionary attempt to concipe the totality of the relations in the world and in the society and the situation of individuals in them without any transcendence, without any kinds of mysticisms, without justification of social domination, oppression and exploitation, and relying only on work, science and historical experience”.44 However, in the Second International, this distinction between ideology and scientific world outlook became obliterated. The Russian Marxists Lenin and Plekhanov already used both concepts as synonymous, and later, in Soviet times, Marxism–Leninism was declared “the scientific ideology of the working class”, thus totally ignoring the inherent contradiction in the claim of a “scientific ideology”. Lenin’s interpretation of the concept of “ideology” subsequently determined the way in which it was used by the communist parties and in countries of “real socialism”. Lenin developed the idea of a new kind of party, whose task would be to

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help the proletariat to develop an adequate class consciousness. This led him to a strong thesis concerning the role played by ideology in the politics of the working class: “Since there can be no talk of an independent ideology formulated by the working masses themselves in the process of their movement, the only choice is—either bourgeois or socialist ideology. There is no middle course (for mankind has not created a ‘third’ ideology and, moreover, in a society torn by class antagonisms there can never be a non-class or above-class ideology)”.45 In this characterisation, the thesis that ideology is associated with a class view coincides with Marx’s original thoughts. There is, however, a new element—the assertion that the proletariat should be led by a “socialist ideology”, which, as the theory of socialism is defined as a science, means that a scientific ideology should be possible. It is quite obvious that Lenin here uses the word “ideology” in another sense than Marx. The concept of ideology merges in its Leninist use with the concept of “world outlook”. If we hold to the formulations Marx gave in The German Ideology, this is a clear transgression of the original definition of what should be understood by “ideology”. A world outlook can very well be scientific, but ideology cannot, since its function consists in perpetuating illusory views for reasons of class apology.46 For Antonio Gramsci, the problem of ideology was above all a problem of hegemony. He appreciated Lenin’s views as he wrote: “Ilich [Lenin] advanced philosophy as philosophy in so far as he advanced political doctrine and practice. The realisation of a hegemonic apparatus, in so far as it creates a new ideological terrain, determines a reform of consciousness and of methods of knowledge: it is a fact of knowledge, a philosophical fact”.47 From this Gramsci concluded, “The foundation of a directive class [classe dirigente] (i.e. of a State) is equivalent to the creation of a Weltanschauung [world outlook]”.48 By focusing on the question of hegemony and its apparatuses, Gramsci touched on a theme which Marx had not developed. The question of “ideological apparatuses” has been at the centre of attention in discussion among many Marxists. An important contribution to the post-Marx ideology discussion which follows in Gramsci’s footsteps is the project by German scholars led by W. F. Haug, known as Projekt Ideologie-Theorie (PIT). It focuses on the question of hegemonic apparatuses, whose functioning is explained as a “socialization from above”. However, in this approach, the epistemological aspect of ideology—that is, the question of truth vs. non-truth—is not the focus of attention.

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Louis Althusser’s Ideology Theory Louis Althusser’s views pertain to Gramsci insofar as his attention is focused on the ideological state apparatuses, too, and not so much on the thought-content of ideological assertions. In his influential and much discussed essay on ideology and ideological state apparatuses (ISAs)49 Althusser wrote that the ideological apparatuses differ from repressive apparatuses (police etc.) in that they belong to the private, not public domain. But they function in a similar way: “Thus Schools and Churches use suitable methods of punishment, expulsion, selection, etc., to ‘discipline’ not only their shepherds, but also their flocks. The same is true of the Family…. The same is true of the cultural IS Apparatus (censorship, among other things), etc.”.50 That the ideological apparatuses can function in this manner (i.e. produce causal effects in the physical world), is according to Althusser lastly due to the fact that ideology is a material force. Influenced by ideology, men begin to behave according to its precepts. Althusser reminds us of Pascal’s words: “Kneel down, move your lips in prayer, and you will believe”. So an ideology turns into practice and gets materialised in the acts of the believer: “[T]he existence of the ideas of his belief is material in that his ideas are his material actions inserted into material practices governed by material rituals which are themselves defined by the material ideological apparatus from which derive the ideas of that subject”.51 Althusser’s thesis of ideological illusions as a material force is difficult to reconcile not only with the fact that Marx did not identify ideology with ideological institutions, but even—in a more general level—with a materialist understanding of “truth” and “falsity”. If we concur with Althusser that false, ideological ideas exist by their own force, it would be tantamount with the assertion that falsity is not caused in and by the act of judgement, but resides already in the things of which we judge. What this means, can be illustrated by a simple example. Take a glass filled with water and put a spoon in it. When you look at the glass, it seems that the spoon is broken, although it really is not. The illusion is created by the refraction of light in water. This illusion is “objective” insofar as the laws of optics create it again and again, quite independently of our will. But as long as I only sense that the spoon seems broken, it cannot yet be said that in my sensation there is any falsehood. Actually, my senses supply to me in a quite reliable manner the ways the laws of optics work when light

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goes through different substances. The impression of a broken spoon becomes a falsehood only when I make the judgement that the spoon really is broken. This was already Aristotle’s point, when he stressed, that “‘falsity’ and ‘truth’ are not in things […] but in thought ” (Met. 1027 b). It is no sense to call things as such “false”, independently of human judgements. In the Althusserian ideology theory, the element of judgement is, however, in fact absent. The ideologies arise quasi automatically, as a result of the subject kneeling, making signs of the cross and so on, without further reflecting on his doings. Althusser himself recognises the ambiguities of his ideology theory by inserting a comment: “Of course, the material existence of the ideology in an apparatus and its practices does not have the same modality as the material existence of a paving-stone or a rifle. But, at the risk of being taken for a Neo-Aristotelian (NB Marx had a very high regard for Aristotle), I shall say that ‘matter is discussed in many senses’, or rather that it exists in different modalities, all rooted in the last instance in ‘physical’ matter”.52 Nevertheless, he concludes that “while admitting that they [the ideological forms] do not correspond to reality, i.e. that they constitute an illusion, we admit that they do make allusion to reality”.53 In other words, illusions are not only real in the sense that I actually have them, but they exist by their own force—although maybe in “a different modality” than, for example, a stone. Of which this different modality should consist, Althusser does not explain to us. Further, this result is in a strange contradiction with Althusser’s own assertions concerning his Spinozism. In Elements of Self-Critique he had declared that Spinozism had been his “powerful and compromising passion”. However, Spinoza had a doctrine of truth which is diametrically opposed to the main tenets of Althusserian ideology theory. According to Spinoza, the falsity of false ideas “consists” of non-existence and can play no positive role whatsoever: “In the ideas there is nothing positive, according to which they can be called false” (Eth. II prop. 33), since “false ideas consist only of the privation of knowledge” (Eth. II prop. 35). Accordingly, Spinoza does not accept the claim, that for example, religious ideas, although false, nevertheless can have positive effects because they steer us towards a moral conduct. Spinoza does not, of course, deny the role the religious beliefs play in human life, but this is due to the fact that religions contain, besides false ideas, even such directives for life which are in themselves quite adequate. In other words, a religious doctrine may have positive effects, but not thanks to its falsity; on the

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contrary, the positive effects are results of the adequate parts which the doctrine possesses. While we can say that Marx’s epistemological position was close to Aristotle54 and Spinoza, Althusser’s view of ideology is actually more related to Platon’s doctrine of the “beautiful lie” (to kalon pseudos ) as a necessary part of the ideology of the polis state, or to Nietzsche’s thesis of the positive effects of a lie.55

Althusser and Bogdanov Althusser’s theory of ideology has been hailed as an original contribution to Marxism, but it has a predecessor in the discussions of pre-revolutionary Russian Marxists. The “organization theory” of Aleksandr Bogdanov (1873–1928), sometimes called “Lenin’s Rival”56 has traits which come rather close to what Althusser wrote over half a decade later. For a while in the first years of the twentieth century, Bogdanov’s empirio-critical revision of Marxism which he himself dubbed as Empiriomonism, was very influential in the left current of Russian Social Democracy—so influential that many contemporaries (even such prominent ones as Maxim Gorky) were ready to take it as the philosophy proper of Bolshevism. Lenin was worried about Bogdanov’s influence among the party cadres and finally decided to straighten out the philosophical accounts with him by publishing, in 1909, the pamphlet Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, where he attempted to show that Bogdanov’s philosophy was not Marxist at all but a variation of subjective idealism of the Austrian positivists Ernst Mach and Richard Avenarius. After Lenin’s attack, Bogdanov’s fame began to descend. After the October Revolution, he fell into a relative oblivion; only at the beginning of the new millennium new interest in his theories has again emerged. Probably, Althusser never studied Bogdanov and thus not noticed the similarity of some of his ideas with Lenin’s rival. These similarities are, however, especially striking in the field of ideology theory. Bogdanov’s ambition was to create a universal theory of society. Although he held himself as a Marxist, his approach differed considerably from the traditional Marxist socio-economic theory. He called his own philosophy “empiriomonism”, because he thought that Avenarius had not yet managed fully to overcome the epistemological subject–object dualism. For Bogdanov, the main factor in the historical development of human societies was not material production, but “organisation”, a

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concept which gave the key to true monism. Material and ideal production are but two sides of a holistic organisational principle. Indeed, Bogdanov’s ambition was to create a general theory of organisation in nature and society, a theory which he dubbed tektology (from the Greek téktôn “carpenter, builder”). As such, the tektology is an interesting and historically an early attempt to develop a theory of holistic, emergent systems. Bogdanov’s philosophical presuppositions—exactly those which Lenin had criticised—led, however, him to create a theory whose Marxist character can with good reasons be doubted. In a study of 1906, Bogdanov quoted Marx’s well-known passage on basis and superstructure from the introduction to Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy and noted then, that since Marx’s days, much had changed. To distinguish between material basis and consciousness had, according to him, become obsolete in the light of the new organisation theory. The material basis and the ideology were but different sides of the self-same social organisation. “Social being and social consciousness in the exact sense of these words are identical”, Bogdanov concluded.57 In a further text, which was written in 1914 partly as an answer to the critique of Lenin and his supporters among the Bolsheviks, but remained unpublished for several decades, Bogdanov explained, how his “organisational” approach would solve the question of ideology: “The social being of the men determines their consciousness” [...], or: “ideology is a superstructure upon economic forms”. This is then one and same, but differently expressed idea, which has formed the beginning of a new science, the science of ideology, which explains the essence and laws of development of the social consiousness. Marxists have worked much on this science; but almost in half a century they have not attempted to develop further its main idea: to define accurately the objective sense of ideologies in general, their real meaning, their significance for life, which makes them necessary [...] Only when this is explained, one can fully understand, why and how the ideology is “determined” by economics. The organisational point of view allows to solve the question immediately.58

Bogdanov then summarises his definition of ideology, which consists of “seemingly different things”: of the speech, which conveys meanings; of knowledge; of art; and finally, “of habits, laws, moral precepts and manners”.59 Ideology, as the form of social consciousness, has the task to “organise the social life”.60 In this sense, “ideology” is identified with the entire “superstructure”.61

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Bogdanov published a reply to Lenin’s critique as early as the year following Lenin’s pamphlet. In 1910 he published a volume Padenie velikogo fetishizma (The Fall of the Great Fetishism), which contained, as an appendix, an answer to Lenin’s Materialism and Emirio-Criticism. Here Bogdanov, still regarding himself as a “historical materialist”,62 begins his answer to Lenin with a definition of religious thought: it is, according to him, nothing else but an authoritarian way of thinking, and is brought about simply by labour relation to an authority approved by him.63 But this kind of authoritarianism is similarly characteristic for Lenin, who had claimed that there exists an absolute truth. Bogdanov seizes the example of an absolute truth given by Lenin, the sentence “Napoleon died in St. Helena in 5th of May 1821”, and attempts to show that even this sentence, which according to Lenin should be absolutely valid, will after a more close scrutiny come across as a relative assertion. So for example already the date “5th of May” would presuppose the Gregorian calendar—and even the concept of “death” is not so easy to define medicinally.64 These arguments, as unconvincing as they might appear, were nevertheless intended only as an illustration to Bogdanov’s main idea: human thinking and consequently even the concept of truth are dependent upon the historically changeable social organisation of labour. He drives home his point: I dare to assure the esteemed author [V. Il’in, i.e. Lenin – V.O.] that such complex, generalising concepts as ‘Autumn’, ‘Winter’, ‘Spring’ etc. actually are not given to us in experience, but shaped by history [vyrabotany istoricheski]. For example, experience has given us a great many elements of ‘cold’, in combination with elements which formed the complexes of ‘snow’, ‘ice’ […]. The recurrence of these or other sums of experiences, with tiny variations, has served as material for the organising ‘idea’ or ‘law’: After the Winter, there will be Spring. There is nothing absolute in these conceptions, or in the law which connects them.65

Lenin had objected, that if the truth would be—as Bogdanov claimed— nothing but “an organizing form of human experience”, so from this would follow, for example, that the doctrine of Catholicism, with all its dogmas such as transubstantiation, would be true in the most literal sense. To this ironical remark, Bogdanov now answers defiantly, in a passage which comes astonishingly near to Althusser’s argument quoting Pascal:

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Catholicism would be a truth, if it were capable of organising the presentday social experience of humanity in a harmonious and well-structured [stroino] way, without contradictions […] Catholicism would be a truth for the epoch, the experience of which it could organise successfully and completely; this fact no Il’in [i.e. Lenin], with his muttering, can overcome.66

Bogdanov thus ties the concept of truth with the historical circumstances in which it is produced in a manner which relativises it in a radical way. “Catholicism”, he writes, “was a truth in the epoch when it united in an contextual and structural manner [svjazno i stroino ob”edinjal ] the biggest sum of human experiences, in the feodal epoch”.67 Lenin did not understand, that catholicism was in its epoch “useful and necessary, as a socially organising force”.68 Catholicism was “an objective historical fact ”.69 And because the Catholic doctrine was a historical fact, it follows, according to Bogdanov, that we must look at the miracles of the Middle Ages with new eyes. The idea of a miracle “did not only correspond to the concept of ‘causality’ which was predominant in the authoritarian epoch; it was, in addition, epistemologically useful for the newly emerging scientific understanding of nature”.70 A further argument for his theory of ideology Bogdanov finds from Marx’s theory of commodity fetishism. In Capital , Marx had called the fetishistic illusions concerning the commodities as “socially valid, therefore objective forms of thought” (gesellschaftlich gültige, also objective Gedankenformen).71 Bogdanov comments triumphantly: “Thus, to be socially valid, just that is for Marx to be objective. For the relations of commodity production, the fetishistic forms are objective […] As you see, in this question Marx was a strict ‘empiriomonist’”.72 It seems, however, that Bogdanov declared his triumph too early. He disregards the fact, that “to be socially valid” does not for Marx mean the same as “to exist”. In the well-known fable of Andersen, the Emperor’s new clothes are “socially valid”, since no one in his court dares to tell him the truth, but from this it does not of course follow that the Emperor really would have clothes on. To judge so is a category mistake, where from the reality of the conduct of the Emperor’s court is concluded that the fictive clothes, too, must have a reality. In a similar manner, it is a category mistake to assert, that from the real circumstances which produce commodity fetishism it would follow the “reality” of these illusions themselves. Obviously, the crux of the matter lies in what we mean

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by “objectivity”. For Bogdanov, the objectivity is created by human sociability alone, by the “social organisation” of men’s activities. In his theory, there is nothing comparable with Lenin’s concept of matter as something which exists independently of the humans—that is, “outside” us—and is the “cause” of the objectivity of our ideas. The difference between what is objective and what is subjective becomes thus for Bogdanov relative. The objective and subjective are only moments of “social organisation” which form a higher unity. As a result of this blurring of what we should understand with objectivity, Bogdanov rejects the idea of an absolute truth; all truths are for him only relative and historically changeable.

Tanquam Rerum Imagines… We thus see that an ideology theory which much resembled the one developed by Althusser in the 1960s already was in circulation in Russia the first decade of the twentieth century. The common denominator of both theories is the epistemological postulate, according to which illusions are an objective, “material” force. Bogdanov and Althusser are not unique in sharing this view. They have an illustrious predecessor already in early Modernity, in Descartes and his doctrine of material falsity. This is an issue which Descartes mentions only en passant in his Third Meditation, but it has nevertheless important consequences. Without taking here long excursions into the history of philosophy, let us state the main point shortly. There is a sharp difference between Descartes and Spinoza concerning how an idea should be defined. For Spinoza, ideas were always an expression of the activity of the mind, that is, they were connected with judgements. Descartes, on the other side, was of the opinion that ideas are “like images of things” (tanquam rerum imagines; the expression occurs in the Third Meditation). Since images without doubt are entities of their own (in contrast to judgements, which express functions), this leads Descartes to similar inconsequences in his theory of truth than his co-patriot Althusser three centuries later. In the Third Meditation, Descartes adheres for the most to the Aristotelian concept of truth, which we already have quoted. According to this conception, true ideas represent their objects more or less adequately. But then he suddenly adds a digression: “…There is, however, a certain material falsity in ideas, when they represent a non-thing as a thing” (est tamen […] quaedam alia falsitas materialis in ideis, cum non rem tanquam rem repraesentat ).73

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In other words, “materially false” ideas mislead me to believe that they represent something real, although this is not the case. How does the doctrine of material falsity, which we might call the “Cartesian fallacy”, become possible? In the case of Descartes, the root of the fallacy can be discerned without too much effort. It follows simply from the assumption, that the ideas are “like pictures” and that the depictions in our mind represent something real, even in case they are fallacious—for example, when I take the spot in the wallpaper to be a fly and try to kill it. The only way to avoid this fallacy is to recognise that our ideas are not pictures or images at all, but judgements. This was Spinoza’s point when he criticised the Cartesian theory of ideas. He noted that it is important to “distinguish between an idea, or a concept of mind, and the images of things which we imagine” (Eth. II.49 schol.). It is essential to note that the Cartesian fallacy of material falsity presupposes a view of human mind as something passive. A passive mind does not make judgements, but only recipies sensations, which it takes for images of reality. It is thus no wonder, that Althusser, who denounced the concept of an active, autonomous human subject as a mere ideological illusion, reproduces—despite his own acclaimed “Spinozism”—the Cartesian view. He does not regard the ideological illusions as interpretations made by an active mind, but as a pre-existent, given structure. Bogdanov foreshadowed by half a century Althusser’s doctrine of ideology, since for him, too, such false ideas as the Catholic idea of God or the miracles had a certain materiality in the historically determined organisation of human societies. Of course there are many important differences between Althusser and Bogdanov besides their common epistemological viewpoint of the reality of a “material falsity”. Althusser juxtaposited to his ideology theory a doctrine of scientific knowledge, which, however, remained less elaborated than his views concerning ideology. Science should, so Althusser, be free of the ahistoricity and illusoriness of ideology; it is “the real itself, known by the action which reveals it by destroying the ideologies that veil it”.74 But here is a strange contradiction in Althusser, which does not come out so blatantly in Bogdanov. If the subject is an ideological illusion only, as Althusser claims, it will consequently follow that the subject–object divide is obsolete, too. But in that case the whole concept of science and scientific truth becomes problematic. It is obvious that if we define truth as expressing the adequacy of the relation between subject

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and object of knowledge, the idea of a scientific truth loses its sense in case we abandon the concept of subject as an ideological cliché only. In the case of Bogdanov’s interpretation of Marxism into basically a new theory, we can see the interesting phenomenon that many ideas and concepts have emerged earlier in the European periphery, in Russia, than in Western Europe. One factor has surely been Bogdanov’s eclecticism: he could combine freely different elements of theories developed in Europe (in this case: Marxism and the Austrian Empirio-Criticism), as they did not have in Russia the same doctrinal and institutional context in which they had emerged in the West.

Notes 1. G. V. Plekhanov, ‘Essays on the History of Materialism’, in: Plekhanov, Selected Philosophical Works, vol. II, Moscow: Progress 1972, p. 31. 2. Quotation here from the 1777 edition: Essai sur les préjugés, ou de l’influence des opinions sur les moeurs et sur la bonheur des Hommes, Londres 1777, p. 28. 3. Op. cit., p. 38. 4. Although Hegel, too, mentioned the “ideology” of the Frenchmen once en passant in his lectures on the history of philosophy, it is beyond doubt that Marx and Engels took the term through direct acquaintance with the Tracy—Cabanis group; in German Ideology, Marx cites the 1826 edition of Tracy’s Eléments d’idéologie (see: Emmet Kennedy, ‘“Ideology” from Destutt de Tracy to Marx’, in Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. 40(3) (1979), 366). 5. Jonathan Israel, The Enlightenment that Failed, Oxford: Oxford University Press 2019, p. 563 sqq., especially p. 576. Faithful to his own view of the Enlightenment, Israel calls this historically rather short period of the activity of the ideologues the “culminating project” of radical Enlightenment (rubric, op. cit. p. 563). This is misleading, since for Israel, the “Radical Enlightenment” consists primarily of those thinkers who preceded or contributed to the ideas of the Girondists, i.e. liberals. The real radicals of the late eighteenth century, the followers of Rousseau and the Jacobins, do not belong, according to Israel, to the Enlightenment at all. 6. Karl Marx, ‘Theses on Feuerbach’, in: MECW vol. 5, p. 4. 7. Claude-Adrien Helvétius, De l’Esprit, or Essays on the Mind, London: M. Jones 1807, p. 12 (discours I, Chap. II). 8. See e. g. Claude-Adrien Helvétius, A Treatise on Man, his Intellectual Faculties and his Education, transl. from the French by W. Hooper, vol. II, London: Albion Press 1810, p. 402 sqq.

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9. [Holbach, Paul Thiry d’], Essai sur les préjugés…, Londres 1777, pp. 390– 391: “Ils ne se tromperons jamais quand ils régleront leurs jugements sur l’utilité durable & permanente qui résulte de leurs façons de penser et d’agir. D’après cette règle éternelle, invariable, nécessaire, il [sic—V.O.] jugeront sainement de tout, leur esprit aura un guide sûr pour fixer à jamais ses idées”.—There has been some discussion whether the Essai sur les préjugés is really written by Holbach, as it gives on the title-page a hint to newly deceased Du Marsais. However, the use of pseudonyms was common in the clandestine literature of the eighteenth century, and the content of the book is fully in accordance with Holbach’s other writings. 10. Holbach, op. cit., p. 396: “Leurs sentimens sont raisonnables toutes les fois que leur affection & leur vénération portent sur les objets vraiment avantageux”. 11. Holbach, op. cit., p. 63: “C’est que dans ce pays la superstition & le despotisme sont parvenus à dénaturer l’homme”. 12. Holbach, op. cit., p. 69. 13. Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, The Holy Family, in: MECW vol. 4, p. 132. The reasons for the necessary inner unity between socialism and Enlightenment materialism are plain: “There is no need for any great penetration to see from the teaching of materialism on the original goodness and equal intellectual endowment of men, the omnipotence of experience, habit and education, and the influence of environment on man, the great significance of industry, the justification of enjoyment, etc., how necessarily materialism is connected with communism and socialism”. In fact: “If man draws all his knowledge, sensation, etc., from the world of the senses and the experience gained in it, then what has to be done is to arrange the empirical world in such a way that man experiences and becomes accustomed to what is truly human in it and that he becomes aware of himself as man. If correctly understood interest is the principle of all morality, man’s private interest must be made to coincide with the interest of humanity […] If man is shaped by environment, his environment must be made human” (op. cit., pp. 132–133). Let us note, too, that in March 1845, when jotting down a draft for a “Library of Best Foreign Socialist Writers”, a publication project which was not realized, Marx included there the works of Helvétius and Holbach (cf. Marx and Engels, CW vol. 4, p. 666). 14. So, for example, Alain Bihr, Le Premier âge du capitalisme (1415–1763), tome 2, Lausanne/Paris: Éditions Page/Éditions Syllepse 2019, p. 722: “Laïcisme, rationalisme, universalisme et cosmopolitisme, progressisme, liberalisme: telles sont les pierres angulaires de la Weltanschauung des Lumières […][E]lles s’articulent toutes avec la dynamique protocapitaliste […]Elles idéologisent cette dynamique”. 15. Marx, Engels, The German Ideology, MECW vol. 5, p. 44 sqq.

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16. Karl Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, MECW vol. 29, p. 263. 17. Marx, Engels, The German Ideology, MECW vol. 5, p. 45. 18. Marx, Engels, The German Ideology, MECW vol. 5, p. 47. 19. Marx, Engels, The German Ideology, MECW vol. 5, p. 46 sqq. 20. Marx, Engels, The German Ideology, MECW vol. 5, p. 47. 21. This seems to be the problem of Frank Fischbach’s interpretation of Marx’s concept of ideology. For Fischbach, Marx is a follower of a Spinozistic theory of truth, in which inadequate ideas are defined as “distorted” and “mutilated”. The scale from inadequate to adequate ideas forms a continuum in which the ideas become increasingly “complete”; those ideas which remain incomplete and thus not adequate are ideological (see Frank Fischbach, Philosophies de Marx, Paris: Vrin 2015, pp. 45 sqq., 59 sqq.). To call Marx’s theory of truth “Spinozistic” in the sense that truth is a process towards ever more adequate ideas, is not implausible, as I already have hinted at the beginning of this article. But if all inadequate ideas are labelled “ideological”, this makes it difficult to distinguish scientific theories that are still in progress (and thus ‘incomplete’) from ideology. Since all ideas are to some degree always “incomplete”, it seems in fact to follow from Fischbach’s view that all human thinking is “ideological”. 22. Marx, Engels, The German Ideology, MECW, p. 36. 23. Ludwig Feuerbach, ‘Vorläufige Thesen zur Reformation der Philosophie’, in: Gesammelte Werke, Bd. 9, Berlin: Akademie-Verlag 1982. 24. MECW vol. 28, p. 101. 25. Isabelle Garo, L’idéologie ou la pensée embarquée, Paris: La Fabrique éditions 2009, pp. 135, 139. 26. Marx, Capital , vol. I, MECW vol. 35, p. 83. 27. MECW vol. 32, p. 429. 28. Using this distinction between an objectively arising illusion and its ideological use, we might criticize Feuerbach’s interpretation of religion, too. The old Enlightenment materialism—most consequently such thinkers as Holbach and abbé Meslier—had declared the religion to be but more or less conscious fraud. They thus did not detect the social roots of religion. By his alienation theory, Feuerbach detected these roots better, but the moment of “fraud” (i.e. the ideological moment) in religion was, in turn, not sufficiently thematized by him. He was satisfied with having shown that all religion is illusory. However, these two moments in religion are distinguishable. All religion may be illusory, but all religion is not an ideological “fraud”; that is why many emancipatory movements, especially in pre-modern times, have clad their demands and hopes in a religious form. 29. Rubric of Chapter II of The Poverty of Philosophy, MECW vol. 6, p. 161. 30. Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy, MECW vol. 6, p. 162.

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31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36.

37. 38.

39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46.

Marx, Capital , vol. I, Chap. I, MECW vol. 35, p. 92 (footnote). Marx, Capital , vol. I, MECW vol. 35, p. 15. See Marx, Capital , vol. II, MECW vol. 36, p. 480 sqq. Marx, Capital , vol. I, MECW vol. 35 p. 168. ‘Voilà le crétinisme bourgeois dans toute sa bèatitude!’; Marx, Capital, vol. II, MECW vol. 36 p. 488. This is noted by Emmet Kennedy, too. Although the creators of “ideology” intended to have an impartial and analytical science of men’s opinions and ideas, it in fact and paradoxically was an ideology in the “partial” sense—according to Kennedy, “it was the ideology of a group of propertied intellectuals in power after Thermidor, who hoped to use it to transform and stabilize post-revolutionary France” (Kennedy, op. cit., p. 358). Friedrich Engels, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, MECW vol. 24, p. 304. Friedrich Engels, ‘Juristensozialismus’, in: Die Neue Zeit no. 2, 1887. In the published version of the article in Neue Zeit, Engels is given as the sole author, but actually it is impossible to discern which parts were written by Engels, which by Kautsky. The quoted passage and the expression “in the last instance” are absent from an unpublished manuscript version by Engels, which served as the base of the published article. Be it as it may, Kautsky wrote the published article following Engels’ instructions. For details, see the commentary of the editors on MECW vol. 26, p. 696 (footnote 510). An informative survey of different conceptualisations of ideology in the wake of Marx is found in Jan Rehmann’s Theories of Ideology (2013). Friedrich Engels, Anti-Dühring, MECW vol. 25, p. 8. Op. cit., pp. 128–129. Op. cit., p. 89. Wolfgang Fritz Haug, Vorschule zur Philosophie der Praxis, Berlin: Argument Verlag 2021, p. 86. Op. cit., p. 149. V. I. Lenin, What is To Be Done?, Collected Works, vol. 5, p. 384. The Leninist tradition stresses rightly the class functions of ideology, but, strangely enough, seems to obscure its apologetic functions. One example among many: the authoritative dictionary Philosophisches Wörterbuch published in the German Democratic Republic by Georg Klaus and Manfred Buhr defines ideology as a “system of social (political, economic, juridical, pedagogical, artistic, moral, philosophical etc.) views, which express certain class interests” (Klaus and Buhr, vol. I, p. 546). Here the class essence of ideology is sharply stressed. However, this is not enough to define the concept of ideology, since it is of course quite possible to

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47. 48. 49.

50.

51. 52. 53. 54. 55.

56. 57.

58. 59. 60. 61.

62. 63.

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formulate class interests in a scientific manner, too. Such a scientific formulation of class interests may sound cynical (as, for example, Adam Smith’s and David Ricardo’s comments on capitalism), but in every case it is not ideological, i.e. apologetic. Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, London: Lawrence & Wishart 1971, p. 690. Gramsci, op. cit., p. 711. Louis Althusser, ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses’, in: Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, Monthly Review Press 1971. Louis Althusser, ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses’, in: Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, Monthly Review Press 1971, p. 138. Althusser, op. cit., p. 158. Althusser, op. cit., p. 156. Althusser, op. cit., p. 153. Althusser himself stressed Marx’s “high regard of Aristotle” in the passage I just quoted above. Platon explains his kalon pseudos doctrine at length in Politeia (III, 389 sqq., III.414 sqq.); Nietzsche speaks of the “Unwahrheit als Lebensbedingung” in F. Nietzsche, Werke in zwei Bänden, Leipzig: Kröner 1930, Bd. II, p. 4. This is the title of Dietrich Grille’s meticulous study on Bogdanov (see Grille 1966). A. A. Bogdanov, Iz psikhologii obshchestva, Moskva 1906, pp. 57–66. Quoted here according to James D. White, Red Hamlet. The Life and Ideas of Alexander Bogdanov, Leiden/Boston: Brill 2018 (Historical Materialism Book Series vol. 172), p. 75. A. A. Bogdanov, Desjatiletie otluchenija ot marksizma. Jubileinyi sbornik (1904–1914), vol. 3, Moskva: Airo XX 1995, p. 54. Op. cit., p. 55. Op. cit., p. 56. The editors of Bogdanov’s text claim in the notes (op. cit., p. 199, note 41) that in the above cited passage the phrase “ideology is a superstructure upon economic forms” should be a quotation from Marx’s foreword to Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy of 1859. This, however, is not the case; Marx did not identify ideology with the superstructure, and one seeks in vain in Marx the sentence attributed to him by Bogdanov. A. A. Bogdanov, Padenie velikogo fetishizma, izd. 2-oe, Moskva: URSS 2010, p. 143. Op. cit., pp. 143–144. Authoritarian mode of thinking means “creating of powerful fetishes ” and a demand for men to submit themselves under them

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64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71.

72. 73. 74.

(Op. cit., o. 143); hence the term “fetishism” in the title of Bogdanov’s book. Op. cit., pp. 147, 149 sqq. Op. cit., p. 179. Op. cit., p. 180. Op. cit., p. 180. Op. cit., p. 181. Op. cit., p. 184. Op. cit., p. 184. Marx, Capital , vol. I, MECW vol. 35, p. 87. The translation into English is mine. In the MECW version, the passage reads: “The categories of bourgeois economy […] are forms of thought expressing with social validity the conditions and relations of a definite, historically determined mode of production, viz., the production of commodities”. Bogdanov, Padenie velikogo fetishizma, p. 186. Renati Des Cartes Meditationes de prima philosophia…, Amstelodami: apud J. Janssonium 1658, p. 22. Louis Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, London: New Left Books 1977, p. 38.

CHAPTER 4

Hegel, Engels and the “People Without History”

In what follows I will take a look at the problem of nationalities in Eastern Europe as it was conceived in the newspaper articles of Engels (and Marx) in connection with the events of the revolution of 1848. The assessment put forth by Engels that the Slavic nations of Eastern Europe (with the exception of Poland) would belong to “people without history” has afterwards been much discussed and often strongly contested. One counterargument was presented by the Ukrainian-born Roman Roskdolsky, an important Marxist scholar, who nowadays is known above all by his seminal studies on the formation of the economic doctrine of Marx. According to Rosdolsky, Engels and Marx were in 1848 yet too much under the influence of Hegel’s philosophy of history, which stipulated the formation of the state as the “entry ticket” to the distinguished assembly of historical nations. That Engels had uttered some belittling comments about the role of small Slavic nations in Central Europe and the Balkan during the revolution of 1848 is a fact, but how to interpret it is another question. In order to examine the matters more closely, we have first to take a look at what Hegel had to say about the development of nations and their place in history.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 V. Oittinen, Marx’s Russian Moment, Marx, Engels, and Marxisms, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-29662-8_4

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Hegel on the Nation and the State Hegel gives maybe the most straightforward exposition of his views on this subject in the 1830 edition of the Encyclopedia, which was published only two years before his death. The work presents his whole system in a compact way. He has developed the same ideas elsewhere, too, in a more unsystematic form, for example in the famous Introduction to the Lectures on the Philosophy of History. In the Encyclopedia, after having dealt with the Logic and then Philosophy of Nature, Hegel comes to the Spirit (Geist ), first to the Subjective, then to the Objective Spirit. The exposition of the Objective Spirit culminates in the inspection of world history (§§ 548– 552), after which a transition to the Absolute Spirit takes place. Before this transition, the Spirit is not yet able to find support only in itself: it must accept the contingencies of nature (the material world). It must, in other words, navigate in the thickets of the material of world history which consists mostly of the natural presuppositions, affects and passions of men. The Spirit must take control and absorb the material given by the nature (“the moment of geographical and climatical determination”— Enc. § 548). Here, Hegel sees several possible strategies for the Spirit. One of these is the famous “Cunning of Reason” (which actually is not Hegel’s own invention, but was presented already in the “invisible hand” of Adam Smith, and before Smith in Mandeville’s idea on how egoistic motives of individuals turn into common good). Assisted by the cunning of Reason, the Spirit makes its way through all obstacles in order to realise its core principle, liberty. A further strategy that the Spirit follows to obtain its goal, consists of the different “national spirits” (Volksgeister).1 They are instantiations of the general Spirit and their dialectics constitute world history. The most advanced nations form states. It is just the concept of the state which is the keystone in the exposition of the Objective Spirit (§ 552).2 However, one must especially note that Hegel does not refer to any concrete state—not even to the Prussian state of his times, although his adversaries have repeatedly accused him of doing so—but to the “real idea of the State […], the substantial ethical life, with which the freedom of the self-consciousness certain of itself is identical” (§ 552). Only such an ideal state is able to form the highest level of the world of objectivity, from which a leap into the realm of the Absolute Spirit becomes possible. This is, one must concede, a beautiful image, which unfortunately is not

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able to assess the role of imperial interests in world politics and world history. Generally taken, imperialism and colonialism are not important themes for Hegel.3 Be it as it may, to be only a nation is not yet enough to act as a subject of world history. “A people with no state formation (a nation as such), has, strictly speaking, no history, like the people which existed before the rise of states and others which still exist as savage nations” (§ 549). The different nations may have their peculiar characters and particularities, but the description of them, so entertaining it may be, is rather the job of historical novels à la Walter Scott. “The essential characteristic of the Spirit and its epoch is always contained in the great events” (§ 549). Hegel summarises his thoughts on these matters in the first rows of § 552 of the Encyclopedia: The national spirit [Volksgeist ] contains nature-necessity, and has an external existence (§ 483): the ethical substance, in itself infinite, is for itself a particular and limited substance (§§ 549, 550); its subjective side is contaminated with contingency, with an inconscious ethicity […]. However, the spirit which thinks in ethical life, sublates the finitude which it has as a national spirit […] and rises to a knowledge of itself in its essentiality […] The thinking spirit of world history, stripping off […] those limitations of the special national spirits and its own mundane character, catches its concrete universality, and rises to the knowledge of the absolute Spirit, as the eternally real truth [….]

Although Hegel does not make an express claim, it strikes me that he is seeing an analogy between the different nations and the historical personalities. Like the significant persons of history, who consciously pursue only their particular interests and passions, actually bring about changes that have an epochal significance, proving thus to act as blind tools of the cunning of reason, so even peoples and nations which rise to the level of state formation, function as tools of world history.

Engels as a Hegelian? study4

In his acerbic of Engels’ publicism in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung during the revolution of 1848–1849 Roman Rosdolsky puts forth the thesis that the Hegelian scheme has exerted considerable influence on the manner in which Engels has dealt with the question of nationalities. This can be constated despite the fact that Marx and Engels already in

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1845–1846 had sketched the fundamentals of historical materialism in the manuscripts later known as The German Ideology. According to Rosdolsky, Hegel’s idealism (or at least, “reminiscences” of it, as Rosdolsky more cautiously formulates in some passages5 ) had thus led Marx and Engels astray in their evaluation of the historical role of nationalities, which had produced a contradiction in their otherwise materialist positions. Rosdolsky mentions above all two articles, in which there had been made unnecessary concessions to Hegelianism and the role of Slavic nations belittled: The Magyar Struggle and Democratic Pan-Slavism, both published in 1849.6 When one reads these articles from the pen of the young Engels, the first impression speaks for Rosdolsky’s thesis. And not only Rosdolsky’s! That these articles might be problematic for a Marxist theory, was noted even by such an important authority as the Institute of Marxism–Leninism at the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the USSR. In the foreword to the volume where the articles were published, the editors working at the Institute criticised Engels’ statements: …it must be evident to us today that the articles “The Magyar Struggle” and “Democratic Pan-Slavism” contain some erroneous judgments on the past and future of the small Slav peoples incorporated into Austria. […] [I]n these articles he represented the subjugation of some of the Slav peoples as having been connected exclusively with the spread of civilisation and culture. History has not confirmed Engels’ opinion that the small Slav peoples of Central Europe were doomed to be absorbed and assimilated by their larger and more highly civilised neighbours.7

Thus, Moscovia locuta, causa finita? I believe that it is nevertheless reason to investigate the matter yet once more. But let us first examine what Engels wrote in his ill-famed articles. In The Magyar Struggle (January 1849) Engels draws up, after having presented a short historical exposition of the events, an interim assessment: the year 1848 had “confirmed” that: [a]mong all the large and small nations of Austria, only three standardbearers of progress took an active part in history, and still retain their vitality – the Germans, the Poles and the Magyars. Hence they are now revolutionary. All the other large and small nationalities and peoples are destined to perish before long in the revolutionary world storm. For that reason they are now counter-revolutionary.8

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A few pages later Engels’ tone becomes, if possible, yet sharper. Now he adds some other nations to the East European Slavs: There is no country in Europe which does not have in some corner or other one or several ruined fragments of peoples, the remnant of a former population that was suppressed and held in bondage by the nation which later became the main vehicle of historical development. These relics of a nation mercilessly trampled under foot in the course of history, as Hegel says, these residual fragments of peoples always become fanatical standard-bearers of counter-revolution and remain so until their complete extirpation or loss of their national character, just as their whole existence in general is itself a protest against a great historical revolution.9

As examples of such counter-revolutionary “fragments of people” (in original: Völkerabfälle, which is a much more contemptuous expression than the English rendering I have quoted) Engels mentions the Scottish Gaels, who supported the Stuarts from 1640 to 1745, the Bretons in France who during the great revolution sided the Bourbons, or “in Spain […] the Basques, the supporters of Don Carlos”. Now, in 1848, even the Slavs of the Austrian empire must be counted to these Völkerabfälle.10 A month later, in the subsequent article Democratic Pan-Slavism, Engels thinks that he has all reasons to repeat his verdict once more and without changes: We repeat: apart from the Poles, the Russians, and at most the Turkish Slavs, no Slav people has a future, for the simple reason that all the other Slavs lack the primary historical, geographical, political and industrial conditions for independence and viability […] The Czechs, among whom we would include the Moravians and Slovaks […] have never had a history of their own. Bohemia has been chained to Germany since the time of Charles the Great […] The same thing holds for the Southern Slavs proper. Where is the history of the Illyrian Slovenes, the Dalmatians, Croats and Shokazians? Since the eleventh century they have lost the last semblance of political independence and have been partly under German, partly under Venetian, and partly under Magyar rule. And it is desired to put together a vigorous, independent, viable nation out of these tattered remnants?11

According to Rosdolsky, this analysis carried out by Engels reveals that he views the role of smaller Slavic nations with the eyes of a full-fledged Hegelian. Indeed, a “striking similarity with Hegel’s theory of history”12

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can be discerned, especially with the Hegelian “dialectics of singular national spirits”, which boils down to the claim that every historically significant people has to realise only one level and one determined historical task in the course of the development of the World Spirit. Rosdolsky sees Engels here sabotaging the principles of historical materialism he only some years earlier had been sketching in collaboration with Marx: It is obvious that this conception (which descends from Hegel) was indefensible from the beginning and that it contradicts the materialist conception of history whose co-creator Engels himself was. Instead of deducing the essence of the struggles between nations from the continuously changing material conditions of life, it finds its ultima ratio in a concept of “national viability” [nationale Lebensfähigkeit ], which has a metaphysical sound, explains absolutely nothing and reminds of Molière’s “dormitive power of opium”.13

Justifiably, Rosdolsky stresses that the conduct, estimated by Engels as reactionary, of the Highland Scots, Bretons or Basques did not by any means have its source in the assumed reactionary character of their nationalities. It can be explained by quite specific social and economic conditions. For example, the resistance of the Bretons (as well as of the peasants in the neighbouring Vendée area) against the French Revolution stemmed from the specific agrarian structure of their homelands and their altogether understandable dissatisfaction with the initial agrarian legislation of the revolution.14 However, to be frank it must be added, that despite his alleged Hegelianism Engels gave an explanation fully in accordance with historical materialism to the question of why the Slavs (with the exception of the Poles) had not been able to emerge as a progressive or even a revolutionary historical factor. He states that the Slavs did not possess one necessary presupposition for a modern nation, namely a national bourgeoisie. The urban culture of Eastern Europe was from the beginning moulded as a German one. “The Slavs could only with difficulty give rise to a national bourgeoisie, and the Southern Slavs only in quite isolated cases”.15 Exactly for this case, the “industrial power and capital were in the hands of Germans or Magyars, German culture developed, and intellectually too the Slavs became subordinate to the Germans, even as far as Croatia”.16 In other words, Engels does not deduce the reactionary character of some small Slavic nations from their alleged “essence”, as

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Rosdolsky claims, but from very concrete material causes, from the fact that these people had not a bourgeoisie which they could call their “own”. In a second article, Democratic Pan-Slavism, Engels returns to this argument. Referring to the aspirations of the Slavic people in the Austro-Hungarian empire, he comments that “if they were to establish independent states, not they, but the German and Italian bourgeoisie of their towns would rule these states”.17 But although Rosdolsky’s critique is not quite unwarranted, it seems to me, however, that its main point should be directed to a goal different from that suggested by Rosdolsky. The problem with Engels’ analysis is not his alleged “essentialism” in evaluating the role of Slavic nations in the revolution of 1848, but the fact that he is not able to formulate a political programme that would lead out from the impasse created by the Slavic nationalism. Read from this viewpoint, it becomes obvious that Hegel and his influence have nothing to do with the antinomic situation with which Engels is struggling. Even if Engels had never read a row of Hegel, should he, like to every other unbiased observer of the situation in Eastern Europe in 1848–1849, soon have become clear, that the goals of the revolution and the national question of the Slavs formed a contradiction very difficult to resolve. It was this contradiction, not some “Hegelian influence”, which drove Engels, who had decidedly made the matter of the revolution to his own, to assess negatively the role of the small Slavic nations. Maybe this contradiction was even impossible to solve because of the character of the 1848 revolution. Rosdolsky himself hints in this direction, although he does not analyse the problematics more in depth in his otherwise very detailed study. The revolution of 1848 was a bourgeois one. This meant, as Rosdolsky writes, that it was able “to bring to the power only the German bourgeoisie and the Hungarian and Polish class of nobility which was allied with it”. Such an outcome would actually have led to yet more intense national repression of the Slavic populations in the Austrian domains. The German Left was, so Rosdolsky, “unable to jump over this objective barrier of the revolution”. It could only declare the Slavs who rebelled against the German or Magyar domination as enemies of the revolution.18 This is a comment quite to the point. It is interesting to note (what Rosdolsky does not), that these “objective limits”, against which the West European revolutionary process ran into, seem to foreshadow a problem of much greater significance—namely, the problems of globalisation and

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the role of peripheric countries in the world revolutionary process. The non-Western parts of the world seemed to follow other rules in their economic and social development than the West European countries. This was a problem with which Marx became increasingly engaged at least from the 1870s on. The question concerns, in other words, the possibility of a “catching-up development” which occupied Marx in his well-known letters to Vera Zasulich and where he tried to estimate the possible revolutionary role of the Russian peasantry. Admittedly, the young Engels, who was only 28 years old when writing the articles we have discussed here, was not yet mature enough to cope with the entire problematics but had yet illusions concerning the universal feasibility of the revolution. As we remember, the French Jacobins of the 1790s had similar illusions.

Pan-Slavism---The Main Problem in Marx and Engels In his otherwise very well-founded analysis of the “Slav articles” of the young Engels Rosdolsky does not, to my mind, take one decisive aspect seriously enough. Moreover, this is an aspect which is continuously present in the background of the both Engelsian texts we now are discussing—the question of Pan-Slavism. This ideology—for it is better to call it an ideology only rather than a real movement—played an important role in the events of the 1848 revolution in Europe. Pan-Slavism is the “idea of the union of all the small Slav nationalities of Austria, and secondarily of Turkey”. Engels’ assessment of its role is quite merciless: “In its basic tendency, pan-Slavism is aimed against the revolutionary elements of Austria and is herefore reactionary from the outset”.19 In both of his articles, Engels makes clear that the small Slavic nations would not in itself constitute a threat to the goals of the revolution, if they did not have a really sinister power behind them: the czarist Russia, the nest of reaction, where the Czar recently had instructed his censors not to allow the use of the word “progress” in printed texts. As Rosdolsky himself constates, the Russian emperor was “the natural head of the counterrevolution, the actual chief of the reactionary governments of Central Europe”, having “800 000 obedient muzhiks in military uniforms at his disposal”.20 But the Czar had not only soldats at his disposal, but he also had an ideology, too, the pan-Slavism, which served the interests of Russian imperialism. The ambition of this ideology was, according to Engels, “the creation of a Slav state under Russian domination, extending from the

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Erzgebirge and the Carpathians to the Black, Aegean and Adriatic seas”. All this would be held together “by the abstract quality of Slavism and the so-called Slav language”.21 For Engels, it was clear that pan-Slavism was not founded on realities. “But where does this Slavism exist except in the minds of a few ideologists […]?”22 The various Slav nations and people were on different levels of social development and had in reality not much in common with each other. However, the idea of pan-Slavism proved a suitable tool for Russian imperialism, as it could pretend the role of a “protector” of Slavic nations. Consequently, the problem with the small Slavic nations of Eastern Europe was for Engels not so much in their own national aspirations, but in that, they had allied themselves with the Russian endeavours via the pan-Slavic ideology. It may be that the individual Slavic nationalist are honest people, but as the whole idea of a Slavic community is so hopelessly abstract, the “pan-Slav unity is either pure fantasy or – the Russian knout ”.23 But could not the pan-Slavic aspirations have a democratic side, too? After all, they struggled against the oppression of the Austrian monarchy. To elucidate this question, Engels wrote in February 1849 the article Democratic Pan-Slavism, which joined directly in his earlier considerations in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung. The starting point was Mikhail Bakunin’s pamphlet Appeal to the Slaves, published in the previous year (1848). Bakunin, at this stage no more a Hegelian, presented himself as a “member of the Slavic congress in Prague”.24 In his usual grandiloquent manner, Bakunin demanded that all repression of the people should immediately be stopped and all “the artificial barriers which have been forcibly erected by congresses of despots in accordance with so-called historical, geographical, commercial an strategical necessities”.25 Instead those frontiers between nations should now only “those natural boundaries drawn in accordance with justice and democracy” be established.26 “In this passage”, comments Engels, “we already find reproduced all the rapturous enthusiasm of the first months after the revolution”. However, although “Bakunin is our friend […], [t]his will not deter us from criticising his pamphlet”.27 In the first instance, “[t]here is not a word about the actually existing obstacles to such a universal liberation, or about the very diverse degrees of civilisation and the consequent equally diverse political needs of the individual peoples”.28 Interestingly, Engels compares the illusions of pan-Slavists with those of the German nationalism immediately

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after the Napoleonic wars: “When one reads the history of the pan-Slavist movement of last spring [1848] in Prague, one could imagine oneself back in the period of thirty years ago: tricolour sashes, ancient costumes, ancient Slav masses, complete restoration of the time and customs of the primeval forests […] the Slav Congress – a new edition of the Wartburg festival, the same phrases, the same phantasies”.29

The main problem with the pan-Slavism is, however, that “nationality, i.e. imaginary common Slav nationality, takes precedence over the revolution”30 (the last words highlighted by Engels). Yet worse—and this is the decisive argument—is the fact that the political goals formulated with such illusory optics lead the movement “into the arms of the counter-revolution and one day finds oneself, perhaps without knowing or desiring it, arm in arm with [Czar] Nicholas and Windischgrätz”.31 Engels’ critique of the illusory character of the pan-Slavic programme is in clear continuity with the general problematics of the ideological illusions he and Marx had sketched a couple of years earlier in the so-called German Ideology (1845–1846) and Marx a bit later in The Eighteenth Brumaire. In like manner as during the French revolution of 1789 the imagery of antiquity—all those Brutuses, Gracchi, Publicolas—was used to cover the prosaic reality of a nascent bourgeois society, so the panSlavic movement nurtured the illusions of an imagined Slav community, which in reality would not lead only to the old order under Russian supremacy. Engels continued his analysis of pan-Slavism in articles he wrote during the Crimean War 1853–1856. Most important in this regard is the article Germany and Pan-Slavism, published in the Neue Oder-Zeitung on April 21, 1855. Engels begins by quoting from “the best of sources” a dispatch, according to which Czar Alexander II had declared that he will place himself at the head of the pan-Slav movement “and transform his present title, Tsar of all the Russians, into that of Tsar of all the Slavs ”.32 Although Engels added a question mark after the news, he thought it as giving an apt characterisation of the essence of pan-Slavism. It “is not merely a movement for national independence, it is a movement that strives to undo what the history of a thousand years has created”. Now (i.e. in 1855) it has developed from a creed into a political programme, “with 800 000 bayonets at its service. It leaves Europe with only one alternative: subjugation by the Slavs, or the permanent destruction of the centre of the offensive force – Russia”.33 The tone of this article is not

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different from those written during the revolutionary years 1848–1849, maybe with the only exception that Engels now connects the problem of pan-Slavism more clearly with the conditions in the Habsburg monarchy. He stresses that pan-Slavism is not invented by Russia but by Austria.34 In its first forms, pan-Slavism was a purely literary movement with romantic ideas about a glorious Slav past. So long as it remained an Austrian movement, it was not dangerous. The matters changed when Russia became interested in the political usability of the pan-Slavist ideology. According to Engels, Russia noted this first time in the case of Turkey. Here “some 7 million Slavs were living whose language resembled Russian more than any other Slavonic dialect”.35 Soon “Russia […] extended the ramifications of its agencies into the area of its ally”, Austria. As a result, the agents of the Czar began to depict Russia “as the centre of gravity of the Slav race, as the kernel around which the regenerated Slavonic tribes were to crystallise, as the strong and united people, destined to make a reality of the great Slavonic empire from Elbe to China”.36 The conclusion Engels draws highlights once more the political danger inherent in pan-Slavism, a danger that looms behind the naïve ideological illusions of the adherents of the doctrine: Pan-Slavism immediately fell into the trap. It thus pronounced its own sentence. In order to re-assert imaginary nationalities the Pan-Slavists declared their readiness to sacrifice 800 years of actual participation in civilisation to Russian-Mongolian barbarism. Was not this the natural result of a movement that began with a determined reaction against the course of European civilisation and sought to turn back world history?37

Marx and Engels have until the end of their lives seen in pan-Slavism— even in its “democratic” versions—an enemy of not only the revolution, but of modern democracy in general, a tool of Russian autocracy. They have not abandoned this view even when they later, in the last years of 1860 and increasingly from 1870 on, began to make acquaintance with the Russian Narodniks and to study Russian matters more in depth. This strong antipathy towards pan-Slavism may explain the strange fact that Marx never met with Alexander Herzen, despite the fact that they lived in the same city. Marx took Herzen for a pan-Slavist agent, quite simply.38

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*** Taking into account that the problem of small Slavic nations was in Engels (and Marx, too) connected with the Czarist and imperial panSlavism and that this has decisively coloured their assessment of the role of these nations, it is strange how cautiously Rosdolsky deals with the question. On the one side, he assures that “the danger of pan-Slavism cannot for a moment be forgotten”,39 on the other he firmly denies that the negative assessment by Marx and Engels of the role of small Slav nations would be dictated only by specific historical circumstances and caused by deliberations of political tactics; on the contrary, this assessment cannot “exclusively be explained by the counter-revolutionary role of these nations and by the danger of pan-Slavism”40 —in other words, Marx and Engels would have some kind of nationalistic bias against the Slavs. Rosdolsky sees an especially grave error in that Engels subsumes all Slav national aspirations under the concept of pan-Slavism: “For him, a ‘pan-Slavist’ is everyone who does not accept the aspirations of German Austrians and the Hungarians on the Slav territories whuich they have subjected and who insists on the right of self-determination of the […] Slavs”.41 However, even if we concede that the young Engels had in his revolutionary enthusiasm made inappropriate generalisations concerning the small Slav nations, the fact remains, that the association of the national movements of these nations with the ideology of pan-Slavism which had become a tool of Russian politics, was a serious problem, not least for these nations themselves. One might formulate it so that the national projects of the Slavs in Eastern Europe sabotaged themselves assuming the pan-Slavic ideology. A national movement that associates itself with Russian Czarism, with the “system of the knout ”, cannot maintain its credibility as a champion of democracy and emancipation. There is yet another important aspect, which motivates us to return to these old polemics. A closer reading of Engels’ articles and the discussion on the role of Eastern European nations have shown that the revolution of 1848–1849 ended in a hopeless cul-de-sac in Eastern Europe. The elements of this Gordian knot are the following: the limited, “bourgeois” nature of the revolution itself; the lack of a national bourgeoisie among the Slav people of the Austrian empire; the aspirations of Russian Czarism to instrumentalise the Slav question to serve its own interests using the pan-Slavist ideology. Here we have a deadlock, which is difficult to open.

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The young Engels did not manage to do it, but so did not the master of dialectics Hegel, too. Instead of a dialectical solution to the problem of nationalities, he gave only a cynical comment, that compared to the national spirit, the Volksgeist of the dominating nations, which are chosen to realise (often in an unconscious manner) the goals of the World Spirit, the other, smaller nations must remain without rights (Enc. § 550).

Notes 1. Note the difference which the German original text makes between Nation and Volk, which in English often are rendered both with the same word “nation”. In German, Volk means people which have yet not necessarily been organised nor have a common consciousness of forming a definite group. 2. Interestingly, Hegel actually deals in the second section of the Encyclopedia with the state twice: firstly, as a “unification of the family and the civil society” (§ 535 sqq.), then once more as the product of a nation (Volk; § 549), because “in the existence of a nation there is the substantial goal to be a state and to be preserved as a state”. Hegel thus clearly gives two origins for the state. In the first case, the state grows out of the civil society, as a dialectical instance which supersedes the civil soviety and harmonises its contradictions; in the second case, it originates from a certain nation. These views can of course be conciliated by the fact that the nations which are able to advance at the level of a state, eo ipso already have developed a civil society. 3. The only passage in the Encyclopedia on these subjects is a callous remark, made en passant: “The self-consciousness of a singular nation is the carrier of the contemporary level of development of the absolute Spirit […] Against this absolute will the will of other singular national spirits have no rights; the first-mentioned nation dominates the world” (§ 550). These words can be interpreted so that the imperiums have always right; so for example England was only a tool of the world spirit as it waged the disastrous Opium Wars against China. 4. Roman Rosdolsky, ‘Friedrich Engels und das Problem der “geschichtslosen” Völker (Die Nationalitätenfrage in der Revolution 1848–1849 im Lichte der “Neuen Rheinischen Zeitung”)’, in: Archiv für Sozialgeschichte, hg. von Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung, Bd. IV, Hannover: Verlag für Literatur und Zeitgeschichte 1964, pp. 87–282. 5. E.g. Rosdolsky, op. cit., p. 185 (footnote 7). 6. The Magyar Struggle (Der magyarische Kampf) was published in the NRhZ 13 January 1849, The Democratic Pan-Slavism (Der demokratische

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12. 13.

14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24.

25.

26. 27. 28. 29.

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Panslawismus) in 13 February 1849; MECW vol. 8, pp. 227–238, 362–378. Preface to vol. 8 of MECW, p. xxv. Engels, The Magyar Struggle, in MECW p. 230. Engels, op. cit., p. 234. Ibid., pp. 234–235. Engels, Democratic Pan-Slavism, in: MECW vol. 8, p. 367. With “Shokazians” Engels refers to a group of people originally from Bosnia with a Roman Catholic confession, who later had moved to southern Hungary and northern Serbia. Rosdolsky, op. cit., p. 192. Ibid., p. 188. The allusion to Molière refers to the play Le Malade imaginaire, act III, scene III: “Opium produces sleep […] because it has dormitive power”. Rosdolsky, op. cit., p. 186. Engels, The Magyar Struggle, op. cit., p. 232. Engels, op. cit., p. 232. Engels, Democratic Pan-Slavism, op. cit., p. 371. Rosdolsky, op. cit., p. 194. Engels, The Magyar Struggle, op. cit., p. 233. Rosdolsky, op. cit., p. 151. Engels, The Magyar Struggle, op. cit., p. 233. Ibid. Ibid., p. 234. The Slav congress, which represented different Slavic nations in the Austrian empire, met in Prague in June 2, 1848. It had a liberal and a radical wing. While the liberals wanted an autonomy for the Austrian Slavs, the radicals insisted in joining the German and Magyar democrats. Some days later, the radicals of the congress participated in the Prague uprising. Quoted here according to the referat by Engels, Democratic Pan-Slavism, op. cit., p. 363. With “congresses of despots” Bakunin is alluding to the Vienna Congress of 1814–1815 which fixed the boundaries of European states. Engels, Democratic Pan-Slavism, op. cit., p. 363. Ibid., pp. 363–364. Ibid., p. 364. Ibid., p. 376. The Wartburg festival, held near Eisenach in Thuringia in October 1817, was a demonstration of students against the political reaction in Germany, with strong nationalist tones. Engels, Democratic Pan-Slavism, op. cit., p. 377. Engels, Democratic Pan-Slavism, op. cit., p. 377. Field Marshal Alfred zu Windischgrätz suffocated the revolutionary uprising in Austria in 1848.

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Engels, Germany and Pan-Slavism, MECW vol. 14, p. 156. Engels, Germany and Pan-Slavism, op. cit., pp. 156–157. Ibid., p. 158. Ibid., p. 160. Ibid. Ibid. That Marx and Engels by no means were alone in their assessment of the role of pan-Slavism is proven by the fact, that no less than Bakunin himself, who for a while had attempted to construe a “democratic” version of pan-Slavism, later confessed in a letter to his friend Nikolai Zhukovskij: “As regards to pan-Slavism, so Marx has quite right; it was always a covert despotism and will be such one. The Russian Czars always promised to the Slavic people a liberation from foreign yoke, in order to make them to subjects of the Russian despot” (letter of July 17, 1870, quoted according to Rosdolsky, op. cit., p. 239, footnote). 39. Rosdolsky, op. cit., p. 195. This sentence is in parenthesis and gives the impression that is is added later to the text. 40. Rosdolsky, op. cit., p. 244. 41. Ibid., p. 223.

CHAPTER 5

Revolutionary Morality and Russian Experiences: Marx, Bakunin and Dostoevsky

The challenges Russia posed to Marxism did not confine to economic or social theories only. In this essay, I attempt to show that problems of moral theory, too, played a role of a “Russian touchstone” for Marx’s theory. It has been a common complaint that there is a deficit of moral theory in the Nachlass of Marx and Engels. True, one need not browse their writings for a very long time to note the moral indignation they felt towards the exploitative capitalist society. Already Marx’s numerous sarcastic remarks in Capital and other works which had the intention to deliver a sober scientific analysis of the bourgeois mode of production tell their tale. However, although the indignation is obvious, it is stored in the often extensive footnotes, while the main text delivers an unsentimental inspection of facts. The lack of a theory of conceptually founded ethics, in Marx and Engels can be compared with a similar lack of elaborated Marxist aesthetics. Both are fields in which subsequent generations of Marxist scholars have tried to remedy the deficiency by a method of reconstruction. In aesthetics, the fundamental turn in creating a Marxist theory of aesthetics was brought about by the young Soviet scholar Mikhail Lifshits (Lifschitz), whose book The Philosophy of Art of Karl Marx was published in Russian in 1933, and in an English translation in 1938. It was based on a careful collection and reading of Marx’s fragmentary and dispersed comments on art, which Lifshits published as a commented anthology in © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 V. Oittinen, Marx’s Russian Moment, Marx, Engels, and Marxisms, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-29662-8_5

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the 1930s. The anthology was the first of its kind, but Lifshits’s innovatory idea was, nevertheless, his claim that it is possible to find behind Marx’s sparse and even cryptic comments on art a coherent, philosophically motivated theory of aesthetics, which would allow us to look at art and literature as autonomous phenomena, and not only as some kind of appendix of more fundamental economic and class issues. Before Lifshits, Marxist discussions on literature and art had been something like a sociology of art and had often indulged in reductionistic claims, in which works of art were assessed from their social or political dimensions only. In ethics and moral theory, it is more difficult to name a work that would have had the same significance as Lifshits’s work had for aesthetics.1 In the Marxism of the Second International, the attitude according to which Marxism had replaced the study of morality with a materialist analysis of societies, was quite widespread. As a representative sample of this opinion, we may cite a French writer Charles Rappoport, who in his study Le matérialisme de Marx et l’idéalisme de Kant, published in 1900, commented on Marxist moral theory: To be exact, Marxism does not at all have such a theory. Marx strove to explain the origin of moral ideas, but he did not say anything about the inner value of these ideas […] Nowhere does he analyse, how we as individuals behave as moral beings. His historical analysis of morality is defective, too. According to Marx, there does not exist a universally applicable morality. Every class – which are always defined from an economic point of view – has its own morality. Every epoch – which, too, are economically determined – has their own morality.2

While Rappoport’s claim may hold speaking of an “average” Second International Marxist who was strongly influenced by Positivism in its Spencerian package and assumed that Marx had done the same to the social sciences as Darwin to natural sciences, the same cannot be said of Marx himself. Even here, he was more open to new problems, in the same manner as he was discussing the questions of a Russian Sonderentwicklung with Vera Zasulich and the Narodniks. It was just in Russia, where an eclatant case posed the question of morality, especially revolutionary morality, in a poignant form. The scandalous process against Sergei Nechaev, a follower of the anarchist leader Mikhail Bakunin, which began in St. Petersburg in 1872 was an event that Marx and Engels keenly followed and commented. Interestingly, the same process was followed

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by the famous Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky, who wrote his book Demons (or The Possessed; Besy), published in 1872, on the materials of these events. We have thus a unique possibility to compare what Marx and Engels, on the one side, and Dostoevsky, on the other, thought about Russian revolutionaries and questions of morality in general. Marx and Engels have, as far as I know, never read nor commented Dostoevsky. But there existed a connection between them: for all three of them, Bakunin was a problem. ∗ ∗ ∗ Dostoevsky began to prepare his famous novel in the late 1860s. He was one of the listeners at the First Congress of the League of Peace and Freedom, which was opened in Geneva on 9th of September, 1867. The Russian novelist was above all eager to see the Italian revolutionary hero Garibaldi, who was one of the speakers at the conference, as he soon afterwards informed his friend Apollon Maikov.3 One of the main personages of the congress was Bakunin, and it is very probable that Dostoevsky listened him, too. The Russian literature historian Leonid Grossman describes this hypothetical, although very probable encounter three-quarter centuries later with almost a lyrical tone: Everything what happened in the Congress Palace of Geneva, moved him deeply. After some days, he described, in a short, but impressive form, in letters to his Russian friends the work of the congress, frowned upon projects to abolish the Christian faith, to destruct great states and to bring forth the peace by using violence […] But more than by all those explosive theses was Dostoevsky impressed by the figure of the speaker who pronounced them. He examined with attention the imposant traits of this gigant, which was already for a long time been known to him by the reports of others and who now in front of his eyes condemned from the high post of the tribune the whole contemporary civilisation […] On this day, Dostoevsky created his Stavrogin.4

Grossman’s sketch of what happened in Geneva was, as his colleagues almost immediately commented, only a reconstruction drawn by a rather free hand.5 Its core idea has, however, proved to be sound and it has been in the main accepted by later research. Dostoevsky’s Demons was a philosophical and political key novel, whose personages had quite real, although of course not exact role models in the Russian revolutionary

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movement of those days. According to Grossman, of the main personages of the novel, Stavrogin has traits of Bakunin himself, while the young Petr Verkhovensky has his paragon in Sergei Nechaev. Stavrogin’s “educator” is the father of Petr Verkhovensky, Stepan Trofimovich, the prototype of which might well be found in the prominent exponent of the Zapadnik generation of the 1830s and 1840s, T. N. Granovsky. Shatov and Kirillov would, in turn, represent the different stages of development of Bakunin’s worldview: Shatov was, so Grossman, the early revolutionary with yet panSlavistic and utopian leanings, and Kirillov “the late form of Bakuninian ideology: ‘There is no God – thus I am God’; an ideology, which in the novel finally reaches a tragical and absurd punchline and finds its solution in a dreadful experiment of a philosophically motivated suicide”.6 Althouch Grossman’s “dechiffrement” of the Demons may for many later researchers have gone too far in details, it is almost unanimous consensus among the scholars of Russian literature, that there is some kind of resemblance between the personages of the Roman and actual Russian revolutionaries of the 1860s. For example, the well-known American Dostoevsky scholar Joseph Frank writes, that “there is not a single action of Peter Verkhovensky that Nechaev did not perform, or would have performed if given the opportunity”.7

The Demons---A Sociological Sketch of Anarchism One has to agree with Grossman even in that Dostoevsky worked in The Demons “not only as an artist, but as a contemporary historian, a philosopher and a publicist, too. He leaned on the facts which he took from the daily press. The pamphlet-novel about the Russian revolution is built in an empiristic, documentalist manner…”8 Grossman compares Dostoevsky in this respect with Émile Zola, whose quite empirical, indeed “positivistic” working method is well-known and who created the personages of his novels by copying them directly from Parisian street life. So strong parallels are maybe not necessary, since the big difference between Dostoevsky and the “empirists” à la Zola was, that for the former, the personages of his novels were, rather, incarnations of certain ideas which they represented, and thus not directly copied from the “life”. Generally, this should always be borne in mind when one asks for the correspondence between novel personages and real persons in Dostoevsky. An important source for the novel Demons were the events that then led to the scandalous process against Sergei Nechaev in St. Petersburg

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in 1872, the same year as the novel was published. The events and the subsequent process evoked a big public interest not only in Russia, but worldwide, and seem to have disreputed for good the activities of the people around Bakunin. Nechaev, Bakunin’s most intimate friend, had already 1869 mishandled and killed a member of his “revolutionary cell”, as he had attempted to leave the group, and then drowned the corpse in a pool. The corpse was soon found, but Nechaev had fled abroad. He was arrested in 1872 in Zürich and given to Russian authorities. Until this day, the reactions of Dostoevsky, on the one hand, and of Marx and Engels, on the other hand, on the Bakunin–Nechaev drama has, as far as I know, not been subjected to a comparative analysis. It is, however, for several reasons important and interesting to collate Dostoevsky’s and Marx’s views on what happened in Russia in the last years of the 1860s and first years of 1870s. Dostoevsky wanted, in accordance with his Orthodox Christian world outlook, prove that if one abandons God and tries instead to elevate himself in the place of God, the result can be nothing but moral destruction. Marx and Engels, for their part, used the facts leading to the Nechaev process in order to compromise Bakunin and his supporters politically, as these tried to use the International for their own purposes. Both “readings” of the Bakunin–Nechaev affair were, of course, in their respective manner tendentious, but their common denominator was to show that “Bakuninism” does not offer any real alternative. Dostoevsky wanted to show that revolutionary nihilism leads to a moral shipwreck, Marx and Engels on their behalf wanted to show that Bakuninian anarchism was not an alternative to the worker’s movement. One reason why Dostoevsky’s analyses of revolutionary nihilism have not been regarded in the Marxist tradition was of course the novelist’s fame as a reactionary writer. In the Soviet Union, it was a clear tendency to disregard Dostoevsky’s political ideas although at the same time, his significance as a novelist of world class was of course recognised. This led to interpretative tensions, which could not be solved so long as the Soviet discourse of literary history was “overdetermined” by a tight ideological frame. Nevertheless, an assessment that was rather benevolent when one regards the ideological situation of those times, could be found for example in the well-known five-volume dictionary of philosophy which was published in 1960–1970. After having first noted the contradictions of Dostoevsky’s world view—on the one side, in his production could important elements of realism be found, on the other it was “a sermon of

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how the people should get united with the Czar and the orthodoxy”—the encyclopedia entry arrived to the novel Demons. According to the entry, Dostoevsky saw. […] in the revolutionary movements of his time only a revolt [bunt ] of desperate individuals, who tramp the laws of morality under their feet; he saw in them an expression of materialism, socialism and atheism, against whose he again and again rose. He absolutised some crude forms of the revolutionary movement of the 1870s which had anarchistic traits (Bakunism and Nechaevism [nechaevshchina]) and regarded them as ideas of the revolution in general.9

Dostoevsky had thus, according to this interpretation, made an illicit generalisation, attributing the moral shortcomings of some small extremist circles to the revolutionary movement in its totality. However, even in those times a more differentiated evaluation of Dostoevsky from a Marxist point of view could have been possible. This possibility was shown in the analysis of Georg Lukács in his essay on Dostoevsky from the year 1943. Lukács noted the remarkable, but often recurring situation, that “the introduction of a new type of man with all its problematics into the world literature […] can come from an young country and end up in the civilised world”. This applies even to the works of Dostoevsky, and accordingly, it would be a great mistake to think that they are only something specifically Russian: In an underdeveloped country, where the troubles and conflicts of modern civilisation have not yet been able to build up, there “suddendly” pop up works, which – in a form-giving manner – bring the whole actual problematics of human culture to a head and rampage into its deepest depths, which present a totality of the questions concerning the spirit, morality and world outlook of the epoch in a manner which hitherto has not been seen nor surpassed later.10

Provided that Lukács had the right, so one must ask: did not Dostoevsky, looking from the Russian periphery to the European revolutionary movement, despite all note something essential? To put the question in that manner does not mean—as the Soviet ideology asserted—that one accepts the religious and political views of Dostoevsky. Quite on the contrary. As Lukács in an insightful manner adds, some rows after the quotation above, “many – even the most” of Dostoevsky’s political and social answers are

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false, if not directly reactionary; however, that which is important, is “the posing of right questions”. An artist has no other duty than to pose the right questions, he needs not to answer them.11

The Main Problem: Nihilism Dostoevsky had above all the morality—or the lack of it—of the nihilistic revolutionaries as his target. Already before the appearance of Nietzsche, these revolutionaries declared that “God is dead” and represented a kind of utilitarianism, which found its maybe most drastic example in the Catechism of a Revolutionary written by Nechaev, defending the principle “The end (i.e. the revolutionary goal) justifies the means”. The protagonists of the real history and the personages of the novel meet here indeed very closely. After the content of Nechaev’s catechism became more widely known, Bakunin tried to distance himself from the man who hitherto had been his close friend and collaborator. He began to play the role of a too-confident old man who had been swindled by an overly zealous pupil. This pose has its exact correspondence in Dostoevsky’s novel, where Stepan Trofimovich Verkhovensky reproaches his son Piotr for having misinterpreted and perverted the high ideals of his father—without questioning after his own moral guilty as the initiator of nihilistic ideas. In a like manner, Marx ironised in a letter of 1870 Bakunin’s pose as a “bon vieillard crédule”, whose ideas had found their real sense and concrete form of existence in the deeds of Bakunin’s “spiritual son” Nechaev. The psychological portrait of a nihilistic revolutionary—either directly of Bakunin or of someone much resembling him—is summarised in a selfconfession which Stavrogin gives in a letter to Darya Pavlovna, a letter which she is able to read only after his death: I’ve tried my strength everywhere […] I am still capable, as I always was, of desiring to do something good, and of feeling pleasure from it; at the same time I desire evil and feel pleasure from that too […] Perhaps you dream of giving me so much love […] ? No, it’s better for you to be more cautious, my love will be as petty as I am myself and you will be unhappy. Your brother told me that the man who loses connection with his country loses his gods, that is, all his aims […] [F]rom me nothing has come but negation, with no greatness of soul, no force. Even negation has not come from me. Everything has always been petty and spiritless.12

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Already from this quotation one sees that for Dostoevsky, the main problem of Stavrogin/Bakunin (and their likes) lay in nihilism. One can thus agree with Sergio Givone, as he constates that the target of Dostoevsky was not the “totalitarianism” of socialist utopies (such as the famous Crystal Palace of Chernyshevsky)—as many latter-days interpretators think, who see in socialist ideas in general a tendency already ab ovo towards totalitarianism—but, expressly, the nihilism.13 The quotation shows, in addition, of which this nihilismus consisted, according to Dostoevsky. It was a result of a loss of contact with one’s own country (“…kto terjaet svjazy s svoeju zemlej, tot terjaet i bogov svoikh”). Consequently, Dostoevsky’s political solution to the problem of nihilism was “pochvennichestvo”, a term difficult to render in English but which means something like “earth-boundedness” and which views as the solution of social contradictions in Russia the return to the “people”, to the simple and unspoilt way of life of the peasant masses which yet were only little touched by the modernisation. The reactionary utopism of this solution is quite obvious. One can say with Georg Lukács, that Dostoevsky had indeed given false answers, but despite of this, he had posed real questions. And the real question was expressly the question of nihilism— no doubt, a problem even for the International, a movement which had as one of its mottos the exhortation “Du passé faisons table rase!”.

The Problem of Bakunism in Marx and Engels At a first glance, it seems that Marx and Engels are evaluating Bakunin and the nechaevshchina inspired by his ideas in an altogether different manner than Dostoevsky. Moral concerns do not seem to have played any prominent role when Marx and Engels rejected Bakunism. The sources from which their views can be reconstructed are, besides the correspondence, above all the political pamphlets, of which the most important were initially circular letters were written booklets Les prétendues scissions dans l’Internationale (Genève 1872) and L’Alliance de la Démocratie Socialiste… (London/Hamburg 1873).14 According to these texts, the main fault of Bakunism was that it creates schisms and disorientation in the worker’s movement and follows erroneous tactics of forming secret societies and associations. Especially Bakunin’s demand for an immediate liquidation of the State was met by Marx and Engels with a rebuff, even by mockery. When the

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Republic was declared in France in 1870, a revolutionary upsurge took place in Lyons, too, and the Mairie was occupied. Marx’s comment: The revolutionary movement in Lyons was just flaring up. Bakunin hastened to rejoin his lieutenant […]. And then came the critical moment, moment anticipated for many years, when Bakunin could at last accomplish the most revolutionary act that the world had ever seen: he decreed the Abolition of the State. But the State, in the shape and form of two companies of bourgeois National Guards, made an entry through a door which had inadvertently been left unguarded, cleared the hall, and forced Bakunin to beat a hasty retreat to Geneva.15

The critique by Marx and Engels against Bakunin had its primary goal in defending the International and dealt thus mostly with questions of organisation of the worker’s movement. Later defenders of Bakunin have consequently brandmarked this critique as “authoritarian”. In L’Alliance de la Démocratie Socialiste…, which tried to summarise arguments from the many years strife and to give the Bakunists a final coup de grâce, Marx and Engels do not give an especially mild characterisation of the movement initiated by Bakunin: Here we have a society which, under the mask of the most extreme anarchism, directs its blows not against the existing governments but against the revolutionaries who accept neither its dogma nor its leadership. Founded by a minority at a bourgeois congress, it infiltrates the ranks of the international organisation of the working class […]. It brazenly substitutes its sectarian programme and narrow ideas for the broad programme and great aspirations of our Association; it organises within the public sections of the International its own little secret sections […]. It resorts to any means, any disloyalty to achieve its ends; lies, slander, intimidation, the stab in the back—it finds them all equally suitable. Finally, in Russia it substitutes itself entirely for the International and commits, in its name, crimes against the common law, acts of fraud and an assassination for which the government and bourgeois press has blamed our Association.16

Hard words, indeed! The “acts of fraud” and “assasination” mentioned at the end of the quotation refer to the case of Nechaev, to which the pamphlet dedicated two separate sub-chapters (VIII.1 and VIII.2). Quite like Dostoevsky in the Demons, Marx and Engels make Bakunin at least

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indirectly responsible for the affair, of which they had received information especially from German Lopatin, a Russian Narodnik exiled in the West. In a letter to Engels from July 1870, Marx tells him what he had heard of Lopatin and constates wryly that Nechaev thus is persecuted by Russian authorities “simply as a murderer vulgaris ”, and not as a revolutionary.17 The pamphlet L’Alliance de la Démocratie Socialiste… publishes the whole text of Nechaev’s ill-famed Revolutionary Catechism, which—as Marx and Engels suspect—has been written by Bakunin himself, who “never dared to deny paternity”.18 It is more probable that the text stems from the pen of Nechaev; nevertheless, it is so compromising that Marx and Engels obviously thought it is enough to publish it in extenso without further comments. In his Catechism, Nechaev began by defining the true revolutionary as one who has “[i]n the depths of his being, not only in words, but in deeds […] severed all ties with civil order and with the entire civilised world, with laws, decencies, morality, and the conventions generally accepted in that world” (§ 2). The revolutionary “knows only one science: that of destruction” (§ 3). The Catechism ends with the conclusion: “To concentrate this world into a single pan-destructive and invincible force –that is the whole meaning of our organisation, our conspiracy, and our task” (§ 26).19 Marx and Engels write that they will not comment further on “this masterpiece”, as it would “weaken its comic impact”.20 An important point in their analysis of Bakunism is the stance on the politically and socially immature character of anarchism as represented by the Russian revolutionary: The first phase of the proletariat’s struggle against the bourgeoisie is marked by a sectarian movement. That is logical at a time when the proletariat has not yet developed sufficiently to act as a class. Certain thinkers criticise social antagonisms and suggest fantastic solutions thereof […] The mass of the proletariat always remains indifferent or even hostile to their propaganda. The Paris and Lyons workers did not want the SaintSimonians, the Fourierists, the Icarians, any more than the Chartists and the English trades unionists wanted the Owenists […]. To sum up, we have here the infancy of the proletarian movement, just as astrology and alchemy are the infancy of science.21

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No doubt, Marx and Engels saw Bakunism a “childhood disease” of the working movement although it might do much harm to the more advanced European movement.

Where Was the Moral Evaluation? Here we have an interesting phenomenon that requires explanation: despite the comment that the Bakunists “push bourgeois immorality to the limit”, Marx and Engels do not attempt to evaluate further the moral faults of the Bakunists. They only confine themselves to an assessment of their political and organisational ambitions. It seems to me, that this “ethical silence” has at least two motives. First, already since the early 1840s, Marx and Engels had fought against the petty-bourgeois tendencies in the emerging proletarian movement. One expression of the “philister” attitude of the petty bourgeois were—so Marx and Engels—their illusory moralising ideas, like that of a “just salary” (as in Proudhon) or the assumption, that it might be able to create an “empire of righteousness” on the earth by an act of mere good will. Against such illusions, Marx and Engels reminded incessantly, that instead of moralising about the faults of capitalism, the socialists should familiarise themselves with facts. Already the materialist conception of history viewed morality and ethical questions as something secondary— or, to put it somewhat more crudely: erst kommt das Fressen, dann die Moral. In a letter to Bernstein, Engels went so long as to stress, that he and Marx always had fought against the petty-bourgeois philistine mentality, which, according to him, had always been a grave problem, especially in Germany, as it had historical roots already in the pernicious results of the Thirty Years War.22 Seen against this background, it was not so easy for Marx and Engels to go against Bakunin with moralising argumentation if they at the same time would highlight the scientific, non-utopian character of their own stance. One consequence of this was that the problems of nihilism which was contained in the phenomenon of Russian anarchism were not elaborated by them. They thus left the terrain free for writers such as Dostoevsky, who drew his own conclusions from what had happened and especially from the Nechaev affair. I have already mentioned the second motive: Marx and Engels seem to have been of the opinion, that Bakunism, although at the moment irritating like eczema, in the long run would prove to be a transient

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phenomenon only. It seemed to be something like a childhood disease or a confusion of the sort which inevitably marks the initial stages of a new development, such as alchemy paving way for the real science of chemistry. In other words, socialism would become a science and render Bakunin’s nihilism obsolete. It can be added, that Lenin took in the early 1920s the same attitude towards left-wing radicalism, which he in a pamphlet called “the childhood disease (detskaja bolezn’ ) of communism”: a phenomenon which with a certain necessity appears in the early and yet unripe stages of the communist movement. To the theme of “scientific socialism” belonged, in addition, the idea of a scientific moral, which—in a materialist interpretation—should reflect the real facts of social life, instead of preaching “eternal truths”. Engels spoke of this in Anti-Dühring rather explicitly: We therefore reject every attempt to impose on us any moral dogma whatsoever as an eternal, ultimate and for ever immutable ethical law on the pretext that the moral world, too, has its permanent principles which stand above history and the differences between nations. We maintain on the contrary that all moral theories have been hitherto the product, in the last analysis, of the economic conditions of society obtaining at the time. And as society has hitherto moved in class antagonisms, morality has always been class morality.23

It is clear, that from these positions, it was for Marx and Engels difficult, to cope with the nihilism problematics surging up in connexion with Bakunin otherwise than on the level of organisational questions and social theory only. But already here, in politics, we could find in the problem of the negativity which Dostoevsky formulated in the “testament” of Stavrogin some points of reference for a further discussion on nihilism— especially if one thinks that Marx had already in the Paris Manuscripts of 1844 scrutinised Hegel’s concept of negativity. Even in other works of Marx and Engels, there are not so few possible ideas on which to connect, for example, Marx’s polemics against Stirners “individual anarchism” in the 1840s, not to speak of such belletristic reminiscences as Marx’s and Engel’s characterisation of the Bakunin people with the “melodramatic personality of Karl Moor” in Schiller’s play Die Räuber, which, interestingly enough, come already rather close to Dostoevsky’s attempts to tackle the phenomenon by means of fiction.24

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Contradictions Between Marx and Engels However, the picture is more complicated. Both in Les pretendues scissions and in L’Alliance de la Démocratie Socialiste… there are sentences, which abruptly break the cold scientific, yes almost “positivistic” indifference towards the question of morality in the politics. So, for example, Marx and Engels had written in 1872 to the Spanish section of the International Working men’s Association: The International demands that its adherents should acknowledge Truth, Justice and Morality as the basis of their conduct.25

And in another passage, the morality of the Bakunist “Alliance” is characterised as “stolen from Loyola”26 ; in a third passage it is noted—this time explicitly referring to Nechaev—how “[t]hese pan-destructive anarchists, who want to reduce everything to amorphism in order to create anarchy in morality, push bourgeois immorality to the limit”.27 These sporadic and unsystematic references to the general ideas of “truth, justice and morality”, which must have their validity even in the workers’s movement (which is supposed to stay on a higher ethical standpoint than the “indecent bourgeoisie”), seem to contradict Marx’s and Engels’s usual inhibition to make moral judgements. From where do they come, if all morality should be tied to its epoch and to its class roots? The same contradiction is found some years later in Engels in AntiDühring of 1877. Immediately after the passage I already quoted above, in which Engels spoke of the historicity and relativity of all morality, he goes on with a seeming non sequitur: That in this process there has on the whole been progress in morality, as in all other branches of human knowledge, no one will doubt. But we have not yet passed beyond class morality. A really human morality which stands above class antagonisms and above any recollection of them becomes possible only at a stage of society which has not only overcome class antagonisms but has even forgotten them in practical life.

Thus, despite all that was said, there exists a general morality, a morality for all men, which as if hides in the background of history and waits its time to come! An analysis of Marx’s and Engels’s struggle against the anarchism of Bakunin thus shows that they have an important aspect of it almost

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completely out of their sight, that is, the question of the moral nihlism and its possible effects not only on the workers’ movement but on society in general. Everything indicates, that they had viewed nihilism and the elements connected with it, such as the terrorism, as a historically transient phenomenon. That is, nihilism and terrorism would disappear by themselves after the workers’ movement would have assumed the scientific world outlook. In the light of our experience today, this has been a too optimistic estimation. Nihilism and terrorism are a constant part of the modern world, they are not “childhood diseases”. The task is thus, to begin with a conscious thematisation of the problem and not to wait that it would spontaneously disappear. In this sense, Dostoevsky’s analysis of the nihilism problematics is, lamentably, yet today quite actual—of course, actual as a position of the problem only. Dostoevsky’s own solution, which insisted on a metaphysical idea of evil as an anthropological constant and recommends that we should turn our backs on the modern world, is of course as questionable as the idée fixe of Bakunin to blow up it. An earlier version of this paper has been published, in German, in the Beiträge zur Marx-Engels Forschung/Neue Folge 2012 (Berlin: Argument Verlag). The paper aroused a flak from an adherent of Bakunin, to which I answered in next issue (BMEF 2013).

Notes 1. A possible expectation might be the book Ponjatie morali (The Concept of Morality, 1974) by the Soviet philosopher Oleg Drobnitskij, an original study trying to conciliate Marxism with Kant’s doctrine of morals. Due to the early death of the author (he perished in an aviation accident), Drobnitskij’s book remained a singular phenomenon and it has not yet been assessed according to its merits. In this essay, I have not the possibility to deal with Drobnitskij’s arguments. 2. Quoted from: Hans Jörg Sandkühler, Rafael de la Vega (Hg.), Marxismus und Ethik. Texte zum neukantianischen Sozialismus, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 1970, p. 12. 3. ‘Letter to A. Majkov’, 15. IX. 1867, in: F. M. Dostoevsky, Sobranie sochinenij, tom I, 1885, pp. 179–180. 4. L. P. Grossman, Vjacheslav Polonskij, Spor o Bakunine i Dostoevskom, Leningrad: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo 1926, p. 9.

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5. So already V. Polonskij in the volume mentioned in previous footnote, pp. 41 sqq., 123 sqq. 6. Grossman, op. cit., pp. 23, 24. 7. Joseph Frank, Dostoevsky – A Writer in His Time, Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press 2010, p. 631. As to Stavrogin, Frank, however, commants that “a debate has reged for years over whether he may not have been inspired by Bakunin” (op. cit., p. 645). 8. Grossman, op. cit., p. 214. 9. A. Belkin, ‘The entry “Dostoevsky”’, in: Filosofskaja enciklopedija, t. 2, Moskva: Iz-vo “Sovetskaja enciklopedija” 1962, pp. 57–58. 10. Georg Lukács, Der russische Realismus in der Weltliteratur, Berlin: AufbauVerlag 1952, p. 133. In the original: “Aus einem unentwickelten Lande, in dem sich die Nöte und Konflikte der zeitgenössischen Zivilisation noch nicht entfalten können, erscheinen “plötzlich” Werke, die—gestalterisch—die ganze damalige Problematik der menschlichen Kultur auf ihrer höchsten Spitze, die letzten Tiefen aufwühlend, zeigen, die eine bis dahin nicht erreichte und später nie übertroffene Totalität der seelischen, der moralisch-weltanschaulichen Fragen der betreffenden Epoche geben”. 11. Lukács, op. cit., p. 134. Lukács quotes here Anton Chekhov, who had noted that in Tolstoj’s Anna Karenina and in Pushkin’s Onegin, “not a single problem is solved, but the works give despite of that full satisfaction, and only because the questions have been rightly posed”. Lukács adds: “This insight is especially important for an […] evaluation of Dostoevsky” (ibid.). 12. F. M. Dostoevsky, The Possessed, trans. by Constance Garnett (1916); Global Grey E-Books 2014, p. 698. 13. Sergio Givone, Dostoevsky e la filosofia, Roma/Bari: Laterza 2006, S. 129– 130: “…ed è il nichilismo che Dostoevsky si propone soprattutto di confutare, se non altro perché il totalitarismo si confuta da sé”. 14. Both pamphlets are published in the volume 23 of MECW, with the titles Fictitious Splits in the International (pp. 79–123) and The Alliance of Socialist Democracy and the International Working Men’s Association (pp. 454–580). 15. Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, The Alliance of Socialist Democracy…, MECW , vol. 23, p. 476. 16. Ibid., pp. 458–459. 17. ‘Letter of Marx to Engels’, 5 July 1870, in: MECW , vol. 43, p. 530. 18. Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, The Alliance of Socialist Democracy…, MECW, vol. 23, p. 544. 19. Marx and Engels, ibid., pp. 544–548. 20. Marx and Engels, ibid., p. 548. 21. Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, The Alliance of Socialist Democracy…, MECW, vol. 23, pp. 481–482; here is quoted the earlier circular letter of the General Assembly of the IWA.

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22. Engels’ letter to Eduard Bernstein, 28. II./1. III. 1883: “We have always done our utmost to combat the narrow, petty-bourgeois philistine mentality within the party because, having developed since the Thirty Years’ War, it has infected all classes in Germany, and has become a German hereditary ill”, in MECW , vol. 46, p. 448. 23. Friedrich Engels, Anti-Dühring (1877), chap. IX (Morality and Laws. Eternal Truths). 24. Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, The Alliance of Socialist Democracy…, MECW, vol. 23, p. 522 sqq. This is a commentary to a passus in the writings of Bakunin, where he explains that the bandits constitute “one of the most respectable forms of Russian folk life”. The bandit is, so Bakunin, a Robin Hood-like protector of the poor and, above all, the most resolute enemy of the State. S. S. Prawer comments these passages as follows: “The polemic against Bakunin to which reference has just been made is notable for a rare instance in which Marx seems to venture a direct criticism of one of Schiller’s works: he speaks of the ‘melodramatic’ nature of Karl Moor, the hero of The Robbers. Marx had, of course, frequently expressed his dislike of the form that admiration of Schiller tended to take—schoolboys intoxicating themselves with The Robbers, Kinkel stylizing his own life in a Schillerian mould, Ruge preferring Schiller to Shakespeare because the former had a recognizable philosophical system, Lassalle making dramatic characters into megaphones for his own views or for his conception of the Zeitgeist …” (S. S. Prawer, Karl Marx and World Literature, London/New York: Verso 2011, p. 360). A similar literary allusion by Marx and Engels springs up yet once in the same text, as they equate Nechaev with “Rodolphe [R. von Gerolstein in the novel of Eugène Sue, Mystères de Paris ], Monte-Cristo, Karl Moor and Robert Macaire” (MECW , vol. 23, p. 548). It is not a surprise that Marx and Engels see in the undertakings of Bakunin & Co. something which resembes the “Schillerism” of the petty-bourgeois German intellectual. On the contrary: it suits well into the picture of Bakunism as a philistine and undeveloped idea of socialism. 25. Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, The Alliance of Socialist Democracy…, MECW, vol. 23, p. 495. Italics in the original. 26. Marx, Engels, ibid., p. 525. 27. Marx, Engels, ibid., p. 544.

CHAPTER 6

Marx, Nikolai Ziber and Primitive Economy

In the afterword to the second German edition of Capital , in 1873, Marx gives warm compliments to “N. Sieber, Professor of Political Economy in the University of Kiev”, constating that his book on Ricardo, an “excellent work”, displays “the author’s consistent and firm grasp of the purely theoretical position”.1 It is not often Marx makes compliments, so the Kievan professor must clearly have stayed above the average economists of the day, most of them of which Marx placed in the category of “vulgar science”. Indeed, Marx credits to Ziber (Sieber) that he has understood that the Capital is “a necessary sequel to the teaching of Smith and Ricardo”, passing, after this laudation, to comment on a more general level his dialectical method of the critique of political economy.

A Forgotten Marxist of First Generation Nikolai Ziber (in German orthography: Sieber, 1844–1888) is regarded as one of the first Russian Marxists. This observation holds true, although he originally was not Russian (his father came from Switzerland, his mother was Ukrainian), and even his Marxism had some idiosyncratic features. Moreover, he had the professorship of economy at the Kiev University only from 1873 to 1875, after which he retired and moved to Berne, Switzerland, where he lived as a Privatgelehrter. But he published all his © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 V. Oittinen, Marx’s Russian Moment, Marx, Engels, and Marxisms, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-29662-8_6

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main works in Russian, and in the 1880s moved, for health reasons, back to the Crimea where he died in 1888. He did not participate in the Russian revolutionary movement and was even otherwise not politically active2 ; nevertheless, in his first book, Teorija tsennosti i kapitala D. Rikardo (The Theory of Value and Capital of David Ricardo, 1871) he viewed Marx as an heir of the classical political economy of Smith and Ricardo—in fact, as the thinker who develops the classical theory of labour value into its final logical consequences. Interestingly enough, Ziber sees already in his first published major work the value theory itself as a product of historical circumstances. Yet at the dawn of the capitalist mode of production in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when it was characterised by foreign trade, explorations into other continents and mercantilistic politics at home, the economic writers could – and actually were constrained to – leave without attention the question of which role the labour plays not only as an element and a measure of value, but even as an independent product. But the development of different branches of industry, reaching a high level in the second half of the eighteenth century […] gave to the labour as a commodity, which in formal sense was exchanged against salary, such dimensions that it was no longer possible to ignore its role...3

Here, Ziber applies the same historical-materialist explanation concerning the social requisites for emerging of a scientific theory of value as Marx himself, who in one passage of Capital constated, that Aristotle, as a child of the antiquity characterised by the unequality of labour (i.e. the institution of slavery), was not able to see the human labour en général as the source of value.4 Ziber defended, too, Marx’s ideas in discussions with the representatives of emerging Russian liberalism (Zhukovsky et al.) and popularised them in several journal articles published in the legal press in the 1870s and 1880s. Despite the important role Ziber played in spreading Marxism in Russia, he has to this day been somewhat neglected. No special studies or monographies on him have been published, not in the Soviet Union nor in the West, save some articles and chapters in reference books.5 One reason for this strange fact may, of course, be that Soviet historiographers have been reluctant to let other luminaries than Plekhanov and Lenin shine on the sky of early Russian Marxism. But, on the other side, Ziber’s Marxism unquestionably suffered from some restrictions.

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As Vatslav Vorovsky (d. 1923), an early historian of Russian Marxism, constated, Ziber’s teaching “possessed in Russia of those days a somewhat abstract, doctrinary character”. The main fault of Ziber was, in the eyes of Vorovsky, that despite the fact that he connected his theory with certain social elements [i.e. with the anti-capitalist tendencies in Russian society], he did this in a static, not dynamic manner. As a consequence, the whole conception of Ziber’s Marxism is strongly marked by an abstract dogmatism [propitana … v sil’noi stepeni otvlechennym dogmatizmom]. He examines the evolution of economic doctrines mainly as an evolution of scientific doctrines, often ignoring their relative and social character. N. I. Ziber was an evolutionist, not a dialectician.6

This deficit of Ziber’s Marx reception could, in addition, be seen in the manner he equated Ricardo and Marx putting them on the same line of a smooth evolution of the scientific theory of value. He did not accentuate the break which despite all is to be seen between their views, a break which leads Marx to draw political and social consequences quite different from those of Ricardo. In short, “the dialectical method, even in purely theoretical sense, remained to Ziber a book sealed with seven seals”.7 Whilst Ziber’s introductions to and popularizations of Marxian political economy at least are noted in the historiographies of early Russian Marxism, his most extensive work, the 512 pages book Ocherki pervobytnoj ekonomicheskoj kul’tury (Essays on Primitive Economic Culture; Moskva: Soldantenkov 1883) has altogether fallen into oblivion. A new, unchanged edition appeared in 1899 and once more in Soviet times in 1937, but references to the book are rare. However, from the point of view of the history of Marxism (in general, not only in Russia) Ziber’s book on the primitive economy is of no little interest since it coincides with the “ethnographic” turn of late Marx. As is well known, in the last decade of his life, from the mid-1870s on, Marx began to study ethnography, a new science then emerging. He filled several notebooks with excerpts from the works of Maksim Kovalevsky and the Victorian era pioneers of anthropology, John Lubbock, Henry James Maine, John Budd Phear. Above all, he, however, was impressed by Lewis Henry Morgan’s work Ancient Society (1877). Marx and Engels thought that Morgan’s ideas about primitive society confirmed their own materialist view of history. As Engels a year after the death of Marx wrote to Karl Kautsky,

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There is a definitive book — as definitive as Darwin’s was in the case of biology — on the primitive state of society [Urzustände der Gesellschaft ]; once again, of course, Marx was the one to discover it. It is Morgan’s Ancient Society, 1877. Marx mentioned it, but my head was full of other things at the time and he never referred to it again which was, no doubt, agreeable to him, wishing as he did to introduce the book to the Germans himself; I can see this from his very exhaustive extracts. Within the limits set by his subject, Morgan rediscovers for himself Marx’s materialist view of history, and concludes with what are, for modern society, downright communist postulates. The Roman and Greek gens is, for the first time, fully elucidated in the light of that of savages, in particular the American Indians, thus providing a firm basis for the history of primitive times.8

The “ethnographic turn” of the late Marx (or maybe we should speak of the “latest” Marx, in accordance with the sub-title of a recent book by Luca Basso, L’ultimo Marx 9 ) signified, on a certain level, a return to the anthropological interests of his youth work, to the Manuscripts of 1844 and alienation thematics, this time, however, not as a philosophical anthropology, but as a positive science. The intriguing problem is that this “latest Marx” seems in many respects to be quite different from the “mature” Marx of the Capital . Especially as regards the methodology, in late(st) Marx there seem to be almost no remnants of Hegelian dialectics, which played a crucial role yet in the works of the middle, “economico-critical” period (most clearly in the Grundrisse, but even in the three volumes of Capital , too). A conspicuous trait is, in addition, that in collecting and commenting on data on primitive societies, Marx does not revert to his earlier ideas about socio-economic formations.10 Considerations about the value theory are likewise absent. It is as if Marx had gone to the garderobe and taken an altogether different theoretical paletot to wear during the 1870s. Ziber on the Primitive Economy Be it as it may, Ziber’s Ocherki was a project concurrent with that of Marx and Engels. Death prevented Marx to realise his plan of “presenting the book [of Morgan] to the Germans”, which Engels mentions in his letter to Kautsky. But soon Engels proceeded to fulfil Marx’s plans and published his well-known Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State in 1884, which based on Marx’s Morgan excerpts. Ziber’s

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Ocherki was published a year earlier. The books of Ziber and Engels are in many respect parallel works—parallel in the sense that they have emerged about the same time and as answers to the same actual problems, but just for this reason they have not exerted an influence upon each other. As a matter of fact, Ziber visited London in 1880 and 1881 in order to collect material for his book in the British Museum Library, and met with Marx maybe several times. In a letter to N. F. Danielson, the Russian translator of Capital , from February 1881, Marx mentions one of their encounters: “Last month we had here Russian visitors, amongst others Prof. Sieber (now settled at Zurich) and Mr Kablukoff (Moscow). They were all day long studying at the British Museum”.11 It is natural to assume that Ziber has discussed with Marx the problems of primitive society during their rendezvouses. Besides sharing the same problematics with Marx and Engels, Ziber was, of course, acquaintanced with the discussions of Russian Narodniks and liberals on the future of Russian society and especially on the prospects of the obshchina, the peasant community. The same questions were dealt with in the now famous correspondence between Marx and Vera Zasulich in the 1870s (and which may be called one-sided, since it mostly consisted of letter drafts which Marx never sent). Pavel Kushner, who has written the foreword to the 1937 Soviet edition of Ziber’s Ocherki, goes as far as to claim that Ziber wanted to see his book as a comment upon this discussion: That Ziber chose primitive economy as his theme, was to a significant degree provoked by the intensification of the dispute among the progressive intelligentsia about the prospects of the Russian rural community. The development of capitalism in Russia up to the 1880’s progressed triumphantly. The ideologues of the young Russian capitalism […] hailed the progrerssive development of capitalism, but the intelligentsia of Narodnik orientation observed with great concern the intrusion of capitalism into the village and the dissolution of the Russian community […] For Marx, who observed this process and who was well-versed in it, the progressive dissolution of the community was an undisputed fact.12

According to Kushner, Ziber approached the Ocherki problematics in an original manner:

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[H]e wanted to show, that the rural community exists and existed before not only in Russia, and for this reason the main thesis of the Narodniks –which states that the community is “a purely Russian phenomen and therefore the laws of capitalist development are not applicaple to Russia” – is erroneous.13

Actually, Ziber’s Ocherki does not contain any explicit references to the Narodnik discussions about the role of the obshchina, but Kushner explains this silence by the restrictions put forth by the Czarist censorship, which, in addition, did not allow him to speak about “elements of communism” (kommunisticheskie nachala) but forced him instead to resort to such expressions as “elements of community” (obshchinnye nachala). It is difficult to say without a more accurate analysis of Ziber’s text, whether this assertion by Kushner holds true, but it is not, of course, improbable. In every case, Ziber does not in Ocherki focus on Russian matters—on the contrary, he leaves them aside. Instead, he aims at a universal-historical analysis of early forms of economy. Russia is for him no exception from the general development and progress of humanity.

Engels and Ziber Compared Ziber’s Ocherki does not, unfortunately, offer a very gripping lecture. Basically, it is a collection of materials not always quite well-digested and organised. The book consists of innumerable quotations from the works of the ethnographers, travellers and colonial officers, which sometimes may be one or two pages long. In its heaping of empirical facts the book resembles many other works of the “armchair etnographers” of the era, for example, Frazer’s well-known Golden Bough. The material is divided into ten chapters. Since the book is not available in other languages than Russian, it is useful to give here a summary of its contents: Chapter 1: The hunting and fishing on communal level – Chapter 2: Communal work on burn-clearing etc. – Chapter 3: Communal work in agriculture and some works of production [promyshlennyja raboty] – Chapter 4: Building of dwellings by common efforts; the common use of dwellings – Chapter 5: Hospitality; gifts; contingent and changing character of work and consumption – Chapter 6: Ideas of primitive people on movable property; movable property in fishing and hunting people; theft – Chapter 7: Ideas of primitive people on landed property; immovable property in fishing and hunting people: the role of labour in the history

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of the genesis of primitive immovable property – Chapter 8: The absence of a patriarchal family in primitive people: the high status of women – Chapter 9: General ideas about the genesis of exchange; the absence of a right idea [otsustvie pravil’noj idei] about exchange and division of labour in primitive people; the genesis of money exchange – Chapter 10: Activity of civil functions [obshchestvenno-dolzhnostnaja dejatel’nost’ ] in primitive people; its democratic and communal-gentilic elements; the handworker’s companies and the emergence of castes.

If one compares this table of contents with the structure of Engels’s Origin, the differences in the treatment of the subject are glaring enough. Engels follows in his exposition very closely the disposition of Morgan, which gives an evolutionary scheme from the lowest stage of “savagery” through “barbary” into “civilisation” in a rather rigid manner: every one of these three stages has in turn three sub-stages, lower, middle and high, so that the development of humanity seems, to Morgan, to evolve in triadic form. Nothing like that in Ziber. Whilst Morgan and Engels focus on the social relationships—i.e. the kinship, gens and family—as the constituent factors of primitive societies, Ziber begins from the fact of “economy”, which he sees as an operating principle already at the stage of most primitive human associations. On the first page of his book after the foreword, he writes: The combination of labour [soedinenie truda] to obtain means of subsistency by hunting, fishing, warlike attacks and so on actually is not only the most widespread form of the economic organisation of people on the early levels of development, but it is, likewise, the starting-point for all subsequent applications and combinations of the economic structure in the division and diversification of labour.14

Thus, already right in the bat, Ziber is starting from the abstract category of “economy” and is asking, how it is functioning in primitive societies. That the activity of men in primitive societies might better be viewed under other than economic categories, does not seem to come into his mind. Morgan and Engels had here another approach, since they started not from economic, but from kinship categories when analysing and describing the primitive societies: the material production of these communities was organised along the kinship, family and genus, the analysis of whose is thus indispensable if one wants to understand how the

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primitive societies did (and do) function. Commenting Bachofen, Engels actually constates that the “economic” principle comes to contradict the older, “communist” or gentilic principle when the primitive societies begin to dissolve: The more the traditional sexual relations lost the native primitive character of forest life, owing to the development of economic conditions [highlighted by me – V.O.] with consequent undermining of the old communism and growing density of population, the more oppressive and humiliating must the women have felt them to be, and the greater their longing for the right of chastity, of temporary or permanent marriage with one man only, as a way of release.15

Engels thus underlines that the “development of economic conditions” (Entwicklung der ökonomischen Lebensbedingungen) is the factor which leads to the disappearance of “old communism” built on kinship relations. If this is so, we can with good reason ask, whether it is at all legitimate to speak about the “economy” or “economic life” of the primitive people at all—the way they produced their means of subsistence was so inextricably interwoven with the other social relations of the community that it seems to be but little reason to speak about some specific “economic side” of it. Even if we in retrospect may try to find out an economic moment in these activities, the primitive people themselves do not have any concept of “economy” independent of other social, productive and even religious relations. To speak of the “economy” of the primitive people in the manner Ziber does is clearly a projection of present-day European circumstances onto the lives of native people around the world. Actually, this is not the only projection of modern life conditions into the world of the primitives Ziber does. On the first page of his oeuvre, only some ten rows after the first passage I cited above, he continues: The simple cooperation of labour in fishing, hunting, in attacking and defending [in warfare against other tribes – V.O.], cattle herding, clearance of forest for cultivation, irrigation, tilth, constructing houses and larger implements, such as nets, boats and so on, naturally presupposes collective usage of all that is produced, thus collective property on movable and even immovable property [imushchestvo].16

Ziber thus sees property as a category in function already in the most primitive societies—albeit in its first stages as collective property. In many

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passages of his work he for example speaks about the “juridical relations” or “processes” among the primitive people.17 For Ziber, the genesis of private property is a gradual evolutive process, as he describes it in a summarising passage at the beginning of Chapter VI of Ocherki: The following general characterisation of the genesis of movable property – which usually precedies the genesis of immovable land property – might probably be considered as more or less universal. The movable things, which are in a direct relationship to the work of the community for its subsistence, are […] common to all members of the sib or kin community of fishers, herds or hunters […] Under such societal conditions, even actual feats of an individual work, for example, those of a more skilled hunter […] do not yet lead to the detachment of individual property on an individually created product. But gradually the labour of an individual member of the society, which is conducted isolated from the other conditions of production, begins to serve as a natural motive for detaching singular movable property [from the common property]. In the first instance, such a detachment does not appertain to some individual person, but to a smaller community. In this way emerges the movable property of a brotherhood, a gens, a family. But the detachment of movable property does not stand with this, but goes further and further, until every independent member of the family is acknowledges as a real, private proprietary of certain tools, weapons, embellishments, clothes, callte, even women and slaves.18

Already Kushner commented on the occasion of this and similar passages, that Ziber has a tendency to explain the genesis of private property with the idea of a workman’s labour. He thus echoed the classical Lockean labour theory of property. Locke developed it in Second Treatise of 169019 and Engels ridiculed it in his Morgan exposé constating that this “ideal fiction of economists and jurists” has been a reality for a short moment at the stage of gentile society only.20

Methodological Problems … We see here the methodological difference between Marx (and Engels) and Ziber in work. As already constated, Ziber was an evolutionist who never seems to have appreciated Marx’s dialectics. For example, in an article published in the Otechestvennye Zapiski in 1877, while defending Marx against the insinuations of Yuli Zhukovsky, he, however, wryly commented en passant that it would not have been harmful if Marx had

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“somewhat reduced the dialectical side of his exposition”.21 And a couple of years earlier, in 1874 in an article presenting Marx to the Russian public, he wrote: If, instead of the abstraction of value and use-value, Marx had shown at the very beginning the general foundations of the more simple economic society, or what is the same thing, the side of things which is common to the whole of humanity, then […] his investigations would no doubt have been enriched by new and important views. In any event, the investigation n of real relations ought to have preceded the analysis of abstractions, and not followed it.22

It is just these “general foundations of the more simple society” Ziber is attempting to discover and analyse in his book on the primitive economy. They are, he seems to think, “things […] common to the whole of humanity”. Ziber’s evolutionary approach gives rise to many reflections on the problems concerning the method of not only political economy but of social sciences in general, all the aspects of which I cannot deal with here. As such this observation is not a novelty since already the previous Russian discussion (Vorovsky, Kushner) had pointed to the fact that Ziber’s views on the development of human societies suffer from a “lack of dialectics”. However, it seems to me that this critique might now be specified. It is obvious that Ziber’s difficulties are methodological. As well known, Marx was very conscious about the problems which arise when one analyses more or less “primitive” societies, where certain economic or social categories—e.g. value or private property—do not yet present themselves in their “ripe” form, having only some kind of embryonic existence. If a researcher is trying to follow how private property emerges in primitive societies, he is faced with a vexing problem: he must presuppose the idea of private property as a goal towards which the societies in question develop—hence the famous phrase of Marx, that the anatomy of man, a more developed organism, gives the clue to the anatomy of ape, a less developed organism. This viewpoint, however, when followed without restrictions, is tantamount to imposing a kind of Hegelian teleology on the research material, and it is clear that it needs some counterbalancing. The most explicit discussion on this problem is found in the so-called “methodology chapter” of the Grundrisse. Here Marx presents the methodological idea of ascending from the abstract to

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the concrete as a way out of the dilemma of an evolutionary history of “pure facts” and a Hegelian teleology.23 The Soviet scholar Pavel Kushner characterised Ziber’s methodological insufficiencies and his “economism” in rather harsh formulations, typical for the Soviet discussion climate in the 1930s. According to him, Ziber, falling back on Marx, affirms that the economics forms the basis of social development, but he does not understand Marx’s materialistic dialectics. Ziber does not have a right historical approach to several phenomena of social development. He attempted to establish general laws for the whole primitive epoch and found them in the economic basis of the gentile organisation; by his one-sided explanation he delivered a restricted analysis of the moving forces of the different periods of most ancient human history […] [N]ot seeing this picture in all its colours, he could not grasp clearly the inner dynamics of this social form.24

Ziber’s ambition was to show that all primitive societies follow the same evolutionary laws and move to the same direction. This served at the same time as an argument against the Narodnik utopias about preserving the old Russian peasant obshchina and its “communist” and egalitarian social relations in new circumstances. For Ziber, this was more or less impossible, since all evidence from other parts of the world seemed to indicate that primitive communities cannot sustain in competition with more powerful historical trends which lead to the establishment of private property and class society. Marx, however, was not quite as pessimistic as regards the future prospects of the Russian peasant community as Zieber was, although he, too, of course, noted its rapid dissolution in the new political circumstances created by the liberation of serfs in 1861 and other reforms of Alexander II’s reign. In the third sketch for a letter to Vera Zasulich, Marx wrote: Primitive communities are not all cast from the same die. On the contrary, taken all together, they form a series of social groupings which differ in both type and age, marking successive stages of evolution. One of these types, which convention terms the “agricultural commune” [“Ackerbaugemeinde” ], is also that of the Russian commune. Its counterpart in the West is the Germanic commune, which is of very recent date. It did not yet exist in the days of Julius Caesar.25

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According to Marx, this Ackerbaugemeinde or agricultural community (which thus was only one of the many forms of primitive communities and of which the Russian peasant obshchina is one form) is different from the “more archaic communities”, in fact, it represents the most recent type (allerjüngster Typus ) of the archaic formation of societies.26 A decisive characteristic trait of these agricultural communities was their dualism, that is, an inner tension between two principles: on the one side, the house (the dwelling) was the personal property of the peasant; on the other side, the fields (the farmlands) was collective propriety of the community. According to Marx, just this dualism was the factor which gave them a “great vital strength”. The private ownership of the farmhouse made possible the development of individuality, which could not emerge in more primitive societies. Marx continued, in the same sketch, saying that the situation of the Russian peasant community is unique, as it possesses in the communal ownership of the soil the basis of collective appropriation, its historical surroundings, its contemporaneity with capitalist production, lend it all the material conditions of communal labour on a vast scale. It is thus in a position to incorporate all the positive acquisitions devised by the capitalist system without passing through its Caudine Forks. It can gradually replace parcel farming with large-scale agriculture assisted by machines, which the physical lie of the land in Russia invites. It can thus become the direct point of departure for the economic system towards which modern society tends, and turn over a new leaf without beginning by committing suicide.27

Marx thus differs from Zieber in analysing the so-called primitive societies and primitive forms of economy in a more concrete manner. Unlike Ziber, he does not fix his attention on the most general common traits of primitive societies, but seeks for their differences. They are not all “moulded in the same form”, as an evolutionary positivist would suggest.

… and Perspectives The above-discussed difficulties of an evolutionary view on primitive societies, which Ziber was not able to resolve in a satisfying manner, may explain why Marx and Engels were so excited about Morgan. Clearly, they saw in him a researcher of primitive societies who was different from the mass of other anthropologists of the Victorian era. I would guess that Marx and Engels had Morgan in esteem above all because his scheme of

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the development of human societies “from wilderness to civilization” was not a purely historical narrative (like those of the evolutionistic anthropologists applying a positivist methodology), but it had, so to say, a logical “backbone”, too (although for Morgan himself this “logical moment” may have remained to a large extent unconscious). Of which does Morgan’s “logic of history” consist? It seems to me that the idea which has impressed Marx and Engels most when they were reading Morgan, was his assertion that the democratic element inherent in primitive communism will yet have a come-back.28 Engels constates this openly in the above-cited letter to Kautsky from the year 1884, where he says that Morgan “ends with directly communist postulates for the present society” (schliesst für die heutige Gesellschaft mit direkt kommunistischen Postulaten ab).29 Although Morgan did not have romantic Rousseauan ideas about “noble savages”, he nevertheless was a democrat who thought of a future society, where the deformations of the capitalist society of his days would have been removed and replaced with the anti-utilitarian virtues of primitive communities. The evolutionary view, as it insists upon the irreversibility of progress, does not allow “come-backs” of older forms in its schemes. In dialectical tradition, however, such “come-backs” are recognised, and Hegel famously labelled them as forms of a logical figure he called “negation of negation”. He understood with it the process, in which a trait or property, which seemed to have disappeared in the further progress of development, suddenly comes back, this time, however, no more in its original form, but in a “sublated” guise. In Hegel, this process has a rather speculative character, but as a figure of thought it had not quite lost its significance to Marx and Engels. It surfaces again in context with the discussion on the progressive history of humanity, and gives a quite actual dimension to Marxist studies of primitive societies, since now the future communist societies can be viewed as “sublated” forms of primitive communism. It becomes clear, too, that the problem of Russian peasant communities was not a singular case for Marx, but should be viewed as part of this larger, universal-historic perspective.

Notes 1. Marx, Capital vol. I, in: MECW, vol. 35, p. 17. In the original: “Bereits 1871 hatte Herr N. Sieber (Zibepb), Professor der politischen Ökonomie an der Universität zu Kiew, in seiner Schrift: ‘TeopiR cѢnnocti i kapitala D. Pikapdo’ (‘D. Ricardos Theorie des Werts und

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2.

3.

4.

5.

6. 7. 8. 9. 10.

des Kapitals etc.’) meine Theorie des Werts, des Geldes und des Kapitals in ihren Grundzügen als notwendige Fortbildung der Smith-Ricardoschen Lehre nachgewiesen. Was den Westeuropäer beim Lesen seines gediegenen Buches überrascht, ist das konsequente Festhalten des rein theoretischen Standpunktes”.—Marx, Das Kapital, I, in: MEW Bd. 23, p. 22. According to a memory of his friend Ovsjaniko-Kulikovskij, Ziber regarded such Russian revolutionaries as Bakunin, Tkachev and Petr Lavrov as “good people, but […] they had not the slightest clue about scientific socialism or political economy” (D. I. Ovsjaniko-Kulikovskij, Vospominanija, Sankt Peterburg: Vremja 1923, p. 146) (cited here according to James D. White (see reference in Note 5, op. cit., p. 3)). N. I. Ziber, Teorija cennosti i kapitala D. Rikardo, Kiev 1871, cited here according to V. V. Vorovskij, Lichnost’ Karla Marksa—K istorii marksizma v Rossii, Moskva: URSS 2011, pp. 174–175. The book came out in 1885 in a second, much expanded edition (the size was almost doubled) and with a new title D. Rikardo i K. Marks v ich obshchestvenno-ekonomicheskich issledovanijakh—a change of name which shows Ziber’s constant and even growing commitment towards Marx’s theoretical ideas. Cf. what Marx wrote in Capital , vol. I., ch. 1, section 2: “There was, however, an important fact which prevented Aristotle from seeing that, to attribute value to commodities, is merely a mode of expressing all labour as equal human labour, and consequently as labour of equal quality. Greek society was founded upon slavery, and had, therefore, for its natural basis, the inequality of men and of their labour powers. The secret of the expression of value, namely, that all kinds of labour are equal and equivalent, because, and so far as they are human labour in general, cannot be deciphered, until the notion of human equality has already acquired the fixity of a popular prejudice. This, however, is possible only in a society in which the great mass of the produce of labour takes the form of commodities…” (MECW, vol. 35, p. 70). One of the best recent introductions to Ziber in English is the article by James D. White, Nikolai Sieber: The First Russian Marxist, in: Revolutionary Russia, vol. 22. No. 1, June 2009, pp. 1–20. Vorovskij, op. cit., p. 177. Vorovskij, op. cit., p. 178. Friedrich Engels to Karl Kautsky, 16. February, 1884, in: MECW, vol. 47, p. 103. Luca Basso, Agire in comune. Antropologia e politica nell’ultimo Marx, Padova: Ombre Corte 2012. As Basso notes, the “classical” division of the modes of production (i.e. the succession of five or six socio-economic formations) becomes questionable in the light of the new ethnographical data: “Si può affermare, che la classica divisione marxista dei modi di produzione (asiatico, classico, feudale

6

11. 12.

13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19.

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e capitalistico), per quanto presente talvolta ion Marx, non permtta però di dar conto della complessità e dell’articolazione dello scenario sociale e politico: risulta problematico attribuire un’eccessiva rilevanza, ad esempio, alla questione del modo di produzione asiatico” (op. cit., p. 84). Especially as regards to the concept of the “Asiatic mode of production”, so it seems to have been invented by Marx on the basis of the descriptions of François Bernier, the Royal Physician at the court of Aurangzeb for nine years, in his Mémoires sur l’empire du grand Mogol, published in Paris 1670 and 1671. For details, see Kolja Lindner, Eurozentrismus bei Marx, in: Werner Bonefeld and Michael Heinrich (eds.), Kapital & Kritik. Nach der “neuen” Marx-Lektüre, Hamburg: VSA-Verlag 2011, p. 99 sqq. Karl Marx to N. F. Daniel’son, 19. February 1881, in: MECW, vol. 46, p. 64. P. Kushner (Knyshev), Predislovie, in: N. I. Ziber, Ocherki pervobytnoj ekonomicheskoj kul’tury, Moskva: Gosudarstvennoe social’noekonomiˇceskoe izdatel’stvo, 1937, p. v. The author, Pavel Ivanovich Kushner (1889–1968; “Knyshev” is a pseudonyme) became later one of the most eminent Soviet etnographers. According to the Russian Wikipedia, he was “personally acquaintanced with Stalin”. Op. cit., p. vi. N. I. Ziber, Ocherki pervobytnoj ekonomicheskoj kul’tury, Moskva: Izd. K.T.Soldatenkova 1883, p. 5. Friedrich Engels, Origin of the Family, Private Property and State, in: MECW, vol. 26, p. 161. Ziber, op. cit., pp. 5–6. For example, in Ocherki, pp. 172, 216. Ocherki, pp. 172–173. Cf. John Locke, Second Treatise of Civil Government, Chap. v (On property): “Thus the grass my horse has bit; the turfs my servant has cut; and the ore I have digged in any place, where I have a right to them in common with others, become my property, without the assignation or consent of any body. The labour that was mine, removing them out of that common state they were in, hath fixed my property in them.” Engels, Origin of the Family, Private Property and State, in: MECW, vol. 26, p. 259: “Each of them was master in his or her own field of activity: the men in the forest, the women in the house. Each owned the implements he or she made and used: the men, the weapons and the hunting and fishing tackle, the women, the household utensils. The household was communistic, comprising several, and often many, families. Whatever was produced and used in common was common property; the house, the garden, the longboat. Here, and only here, then, does the “earned property” exist which jurists and economists have attributed to civilised

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24. 25. 26. 27. 28.

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society—the last mendacious legal pretext on which modern capitalist property still rests.” Cited here according to White, op. cit., p. 9. N. I. Ziber, Ekonomicheskaja teorija Marksa, in: Znanie no. 1 (January 1874), p. 57. Cited here according to White, op. cit., p. 7. I cannot discuss the contraposition of Ziber and Marx in methodologicis here more extensively. Suffice it to point out what Marx wrote in the famous “methodical fragment” in the the Grundrisse, where he criticised the economists which try to find abstract categories of a developed capitalist economy already in more primitive societies, thus presupposing an “antediluvian existence” of these categories. As to the idea of private property, which Ziber saw in function already in the primitives, so Marx writes: “But do not these simpler categories also have an independent historical or natural existence predating the more concrete ones? That depends. Hegel, for example, correctly begins the Philosophy of Right with possession, this being the subject’s simplest juridical relation. But there is no possession preceding the family or master-servant relations, which are far more concrete relations. However, it would be correct to say that there are families or clan groups which still merely possess, but have no property. The simple category therefore appears in relation to property as a relation of simple families or clan groups. In the higher society it appears as the simpler relation of a developed organization. But the concrete substratum of which possession is a relation is always presupposed. One can imagine an individual savage as possessing something. But in that case possession is not a juridical relation….” (MECW, vol. 28, p. 38 sqq.). P. Kushner, op. cit., p. xvi. Karl Marx, Letter to Vera Zasulich, Third Draft, in: MECW, vol. 24, p. 365. Op. cit., p. 366. Op. cit., p. 368. This idea of Morgan and its influence on Marx and Engels is discussed by Lawrence Krader in the foreword of his edition of Marx’s Ethnological Notebooks. See Note 8 above.

CHAPTER 7

Marx and Finland—Finland and Marx

1839 For many it may be a surprise, that Marx’s first mention of Finland is dated so early as 1839, when the 21 years old student compiled for his fiancée Jenny von Westphalen a handwritten collection of folk poetry of different people. Among them were three “Finnish runes” (Finnische Runen; the term “rune” has here nothing to do with the Scandinavian runic script, but refers to an archaic form of poetry, which in Finnish was called runo). The habit of copying poems in handwritten booklets was a common practice in those days, and from the days of Marx’s youth, a couple of additional poetry collections have been preserved. In every case, it is interested to note that Finnish folk poetry was known in Europe already in those days. However, the first edition of Kalevala (the so-called “Old Kalevala”), the national epos of Finland, had been published only a few years earlier, in 1835, and did not have a wide distribution. Only the second edition of 1849 succeeded to make Finnish epic poetry internationally famous. Actually, Marx did not seem to have known about the existence of Kalevala, but had used as his source the anthology Finnische Runen of H. R. von Schröter, which was published for the first time in Upsala in 1819. Marx used the reissue published in Stuttgart in 1834, which was edited by the author’s younger brother G. H. von Schröter. In the collection Marx had compiled for Jenny, there were only three Finnish “runes”, The Origin of the Bear, The Origin of the Colic and © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 V. Oittinen, Marx’s Russian Moment, Marx, Engels, and Marxisms, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-29662-8_7

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The Origin of the Kantele, of which the last dealt with the motif of Väinämöinen’s song (the kantele is an archaic string instrument). Marx had added to it a note where he mentioned that Väinämöinen was “the main deity of the Finns” (der oberste Finnengott ).1 The collection consists of 80 folk poems from different nations, so the three Finnish poems are but a modest sample; however, they form a clear-cut deviation from the other poems. First, almost all other poems of the collection—the German, Spanish, Greek, Estonian, etc. poems—are love songs, with which Marx wanted to convey to Jenny his innermost feelings, whilst the Finnish “runes” are incantations, or, to be more exact, magical spells trying to explain the origin of the phenomena they describe. Especially intriguing is that a poem on the origin of such a prosaic ailment as the colic has found a place in a collection intended for the queen of Marx’s heart— although he comments that he takes from it only some strophes “which so bluntly express the naivety of the outlook of Finnish people”.2 Further, it seems that the Finnish runes have been added to the end of the collection as a separate group somewhat later after the main collection already was completed. Marx’s Finnish runes have of course aroused the interest of folk poetry researchers. Erich Kunze, a German scholar specialised in Finnish poetry, published already in 1948 in the yearbook of the Kalevala Society a study on the runes.3 According to Kunze’s theory, the Finnish runes had found their way to the poetry collection as a result that Marx, who at this time frequented with the company of the Young Hegelians, had in their “Doktorklub” made acquaintance with Karl Friedich Köppen, in those times a rather known writer. Köppen was especially interested in Nordic mythology and had already 1837 published a short introduction to the theme.4 The friendship between Marx and Köppen seems to have become quite intimate, judging from the fact that a little later, in 1840, Köppen dedicated one of his publications5 to “my friend Karl Heinrich Marx from Trier”. This was the first time Marx’s name was mentioned in the public. Kunze presumes—and may very well have right—that Köppen had given to Marx his own copy of Schröter’s Finnische Runen and recommended him to become familiar with its contents. But why Köppen, and Marx in his wake, were interested in mythology and folk poetry? According to Kunze, the motive in the background was furnished by a radical Young Hegelian aesthetics, to which both men at the time were committed:

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Following Köppen and other Young Hegelians, Marx had […] embraced the idea of the irresistible decline of art in the “Christian state”, in the modern bourgeois society. The Young Hegelians saw a parallel to this phenomen in the intellectual currents of the periods of decadence in the ancient world, and Köppen, for his part, added to this the idea of a decline of the purity of Nordic mythological poetry as a result that Christianity and serfdom got the upper hand. Marx studied intensively and for a considerable period the history of religion and art. In the same way according to Köppen the prospering of Nordic poetry was based on an “original, free tribal society”, so the younger of the two thought that Greek art flourished thanks to the freedom of the polis democracy of antiquity. Both were, in addition, unanimous in that all modern art was Romantic. This association of art with the form of society, as well as the combining of aesthetic and social critique—with clear or concealed allusions to the present-day situation—which we find in Köppen’s Nordische Mythologie, can later be found in his friend, too, albeit in a more expansive and better-founded form.6

Kunze’s deliberations about the role of Finnish poems in the intellectual development of Marx are interesting. He connects them to the young Marx’s plans to write a critical analysis of Christian art: In this sense, not only Köppen’s Nordische Mythologie, but even Schröter’s book fit logically in the great whole of the studies of young Marx. If there are good reasons to assume, that Marx had in mind to prove in the work on the Christian art favoured by Frederick William IV and his Romantic circle that this so-called Christian art actually was full of non-Christian, pagan elements, so the Finnish songs, especially the magical incantations, would serve as a support to his view. These songs thus do not have only a biographical interest […] but, in addition, a certain significance in the intellectual development of the young revolutionary—quite in contrast to all the other folk songs which he had chosen for his collection of 1839.7

Here Kunze already grows speculative, and I do not know any researcher who would have commented on the thesis of the special significance of the Finnish poems for Marx since the late 1940s when it was for the first time presented. The redactors of the new MEGA content themselves with a cautious note that the occurrence of Finnish magical incantations in the collection of folk poetry for Jenny probably was due to Köppen, who “got Marx to choose just the Finnish incantations, which in a special manner reflected the originality and fascination of Finnish folk poetry”

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(MEGA I/1, p. 1262). Michael Henrich, too, notes in his Marx biography en passant the Finnish poems and mentions Kunze, but does not comment on his theses.8 Marx’s idea to write a work on Christian art was not realised and we know only very little of the project, which probably never vas pursued very seriously. But we can find vestiges of this early interest on art and poetry in Marx’s subsequent production, for example in the well-known introduction to the Grundrisse of 1857 and 1858, where Marx discusses the significance of Greek art. This said, it is nevertheless beyond doubt that Köppen was an important mentor for young Marx. In his book on Frederick the Great, Köppen had drawn a parallel between the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century and the Epicureans of antiquity, a parallel which Marx accepted in his doctoral dissertation. Köppen was, as Heinrich notes, the only friend from Marx’s Berlin times, with whom he even later stood in amicable contact. After a trip to Berlin in 1861, Marx wrote to Engels: “I also went to see Friedrich Köppen. I found him still very much as he always was. Only he’s grown stouter, and ‘grizzled’. I went out on the spree with him twice and it was a real treat for me. He made me a present of his two volume Buddha, an important work”.9

1844 If Marx noted the Finns already so early as in 1839, the Finns noted him only some five years later. The first indisputable mention of Marx I have managed to find in Finnish sources is in a letter of Johan Jakob Tengström, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Helsinki, to Johan Vilhelm Snellman, who just had moved to Kuopio, a small provincial town in Middle Finland to become a school rector there and start an ambitious journal project. The letter dates 20th of June 1844. Tengström discusses some novelty books he plans to subscribe to the university library, and notes them: But the Französisch-Deutsche Jahrbücher, which Ruge should publish in Paris with the assistance of ”Froebel, Hess and Marx”, names unknown to me, I have not yet suggested for acquisition before it will prove to be a literary publication, since I have not seen any prospectus.10

The publication activity of the German Young Hegelians was followed rather attentively by the (numerically scarce) Finnish intelligentsia, but

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for reasons of censorship a certain caution was needed. Thus Tengström did not want to subscribe to the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher (whose name he quotes incorrectly) if it would prove to be too political. We do not find the publication in the catalogues of the Finnish National Library, so it seems that it was not acquired.11 Of the representatives of the Finnish intelligentia of the nineteenth century, Johan Vilhelm Snellman probably was the one who would have the best chances to come in contact with Marx. Snellman started his career as an academic philosopher and he might be called a Hegelian sans phrase. He belonged to the same “1840s generation” as the German Young Hegelians. Snellman was born in 1806, the most important Young Hegelians Bruno Bauer in 1809 and Arnold Ruge in 1802, while Marx was a decade younger, born in 1818. Of course, the term “Young Hegelians” is rather inexact. Actually, Hegel was for many of the Young Hegelians a kind of “transit station” only, and many of them soon followed Feuerbach, who already in the 1840s had radically dissociated himself from Hegel (his programmatic article Zur Kritik der Hegelschen Philosophie was published in 1839). A better common denominator for this intellectual phenomenon would be—paraphrasing the terminology of German literature historians—the epithet “Vormärz Philosophy”, that is, the radical thought which prededed the 1848 revolution in Germany. In 1840 and 1841, Snellman travelled in Germany, visiting several universities and making acquaintance with many known personalities, for example with David Friedrich Strauss, who had raised much excitement with his Das Leben Jesu (1835), a book which declared the miracles attributed to Jesus as pure myths. In Berlin, Snellman even visited the Doktorklub at the same time Marx and other Young Hegelians used to frequent it. Back in Stockholm in 1842, Snellman managed to publish yet in the same year a travel book in which he describes his experiences with German scholarship in general and philosophy in particular.12 The Russian General Governor of Finland, Menshikov, suspected in one letter written in 1848 that Snellman was a “Communist”,13 but this of course was not true. Actually, Snellman was not even a Young Hegelian, if one means with this the leftist wing. To the Hegelian Left of the 1840s in Finland we can count in principle only Robert Tengström, the son of Snellman’s mentor, the philosophy professor Johan Jakob Tengström, who in his European voyage became radicalised, but died unexpectedly in 1847 in Paris only 24 years old. I shall soon return to him. Snellman’s philosophical position is rather well characterised by his

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German friend Karl Ludwig Michelet, who put both himself and Snellman to the “Left Center” (linke Mitte) of the Hegel school. Michelet’s characterisation is undoubtedly correct. Snellman’s goals were at the outset different from those of the European radicals. He did not strive for a revolution, but the creation of a modern civil society in Finland, which would replace the old four-estate-order regime. Although as a philosopher not very original, he was more successful in journalism and in politics, and, when the era of reforms was initiated in Russia by Czar Alexander II, he became a Senator in 1866. In this position, Snellman could work for a modernisation of the Finnish society. This was a process which rapidly increased the distance between the Grand Duchy of Finland and Russia proper. Finland got its own currency, the Finnish mark, its own post, customs and railways, which all were institutions independent of Russia. In Finland, the transition to capitalism was a self-evident option and it was never questioned in the manner of the Russian Narodniks. These divergent ways of development were the consequences of quite different social conditions in Finland and Russia proper. Finland had earlier been an integral part of Sweden, and its legal and social institutions, which had a Nordic character, were preserved as part of the constitution of the Grand Duchy. Unlike Russia, serfdom was unknown in Finland, and the agricultural lands had already in Swedish times, in the eighteenth century, become the private property of the peasants in the modern sense. Thus a non-capitalist development was never an option, despite the fact that Finland was a country in the semi-periphery, like much of Russia. However, the Finnish bourgeoisie was, thanks to its position “at the margins” of capitalist development able to anticipate the class struggles which a capitalist industrialisation would create; I will discuss this at the end of this essay. Snellman’s position as a middle-way Hegelian has, nevertheless, some interesting points of contact to the developments of German radical Hegelianism. Almost at the same time as Marx became absorbed in the critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right (his manuscript Zur Kritik der Hegelschen Rechtsphilosophie was compiled during the year 1843), Snellman published in Stockholm his main work in political science, Läran om Staten (The Doctrine of State) in 1842. Jouni Alavuotunki, the editor of Snellman’s text for his collected works notes the strange fact, that “after the premature death of [Eduard] Gans in 1839 and the repression of Ruge’s journalistic activity, there was in Germany not any Hegelian able to write a similar work”. Although Marx wrote a—for the

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most part unpublished—critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, he soon broke with the Left Hegelian way of putting the question and turned to the critique of political economy. In this sense, continues Alavuotunki, Snellman’s Läran om Staten “is an unique and internationally important document which sheds light on the possibilities and difficulties of a Hegelian theory of the State”.14 This is not a place for comparison of these two works on the doctrine of the State from the milieu of the post-Hegelian discussions of the Vormärz period. Suffice it to mention that both took distance from an orthodox Hegelian view, but went into quite different directions. While Marx proclaimed a radical break with Hegel’s reconciliation with received institutions and turned to Communism (the famous words “The head of this emancipation [i.e. of the Germans] is philosophy, its heart is the proletariat ”15 are from the introduction to this work), so Snellman criticised Hegel from an altogether different point of view. Marx’s position was in the avant-garde of European development and civil society (bürgerliche Gesellschaft ) was already one of the main targets of his critique. Snellman, on the contrary, assessed the same developments from the viewpoint of what kind of requirements they set for a peripheric country. If modern civil society had not been able to establish itself wholly in Germany, so it was yet less developed in Northern Europe. Due to this reason, Snellman’s motives to criticise Hegel were quite different from those of Marx. For Snellman, the most important single factor was not the idea of the State, but the “national spirit” (nationalandan) and its basis, the cultural level of a nation, as the main impelling force of history. Thus, the national spirit was in fact a higher principle than the State. This was an important corrective to Hegel. According to Hegel, individual persons have to absorb the “Objective Spirit” embodied in the institutions of the State, but Snellman emphasised, that those institutions are in turn created by individuals. It is easy to see Snellman’s reasons for this deviation from Hegel. Finland, although an autonomous Grand Duchy, was not yet a national state in the proper, “philosophical” sense. The future of a modern civil society in Finland depended on how well the Finns would manage to fill the formal frames given by the institutions of the Grand Duchy with real progressive content. Although Snellman does not speak of capitalism (he almost never used this word), his programme consisted in giving a theoretical explanation and justification for the development of bourgeois society in a European semi-periphery. In order to succeed, there must, first, be a “national consciousness”, then a State is needed which

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enables the bourgeois reforms. Seen from retrospect, it is obvious that Snellman’s programme succeeded rather well. A Finnish national state emerged during the second half of the nineteenth century, a country that soon found its place in the international capitalist division of labour as an important producer of timber and paper. The Finnish example shows in a classical manner, how “nation-building” and development of capitalist production relations are interacting processes.

1845, 1847 A further explicit early mention of Marx by a Finn we find in a letter of Adolf Edward Arppe (1818–1894), who was studying chemistry in several European cities, for example in Giessen in the laboratory of Justus Liebig. During a visit to Berlin he sent a letter 12.4.1845 to his friend Herman Kellgren in Helsinki, commenting on the intellectual currents in Germany: “I believe that Hegel, as a honourable man, would turn in his grave, if he knew which an unexpected turn the State philosophy has got, for which he so diligently toiled”. After a few lines, Arppe mentioned the publication of Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher and continued: The great men who edited this journal, are Ruge, Bernays, Marx, Börnstein and maybe some others. Ruge, however, soon split off from these madmen, and Marx complained that his fate was to perish in a struggle against blind prejudices […] Marx preaches an absolute republicanism, an absolute equality in the doctrine of the State, an absolute non-existence as the highest object of religious consciousness. But the main thing is to exert influence on the masses, to stir up the masses to move, in order to produce this new era. In a book with the title Die heilige familie oder Kritik der kritischen Kritik he attacks Bruno Bauer and depicts him as a sinner yet ensnared in religious prejudices, as an orthodox poor fellow.16

Arppe’s letter is an interesting document on the earliest reception of Marx’s thought in Europe, but the tone is rather hostile, and Arppe does not seem to have grasped very well the message of Marx. Maybe this is no wonder, since Arppe came from a well-to-do bourgeois family and had very conservative views. Later in life, he made a career as a professor in chemistry at the University of Helsinki, from the 1850s on as the rector of the university. His collaboration with the Russian authorities made him unpopular among the students. Be it as it may, Arppe’s letter of 1845

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shows that the name of Marx was already in the mid-1840s known even in rather remote corners of Europe. Among the Finns of the “Snellman circle”, the only person who became radicalised in the same way as the German Left Hegelians, was Robert Tengström (born 1823), the son of the philosophy professor and Snellman’s mentor Johan Jakob Tengström. In 1846, he travelled together with his friend Herman Kellgren17 (who, by the way, was Snellman’s successful rival for the hand of Sofi Tengström, the daughter of the philosophy professor), first to Berlin and continued then, in May 1847, to Paris. Already in Berlin, Robert grew more critical towards the Hegelianism he had inherited from his father. He began to think that the orthodox version of Hegelianism was lost in abstract speculations and “gave stones instead of bread”.18 When he had visited Karl Ludwig Michelet, Snellman’s friend and an Hegelian of the “midway” like him, he had met young philosophers which had discussed immortality, the essence of Man et cetera. “Eating apple dumpling, these gentlemen deliver proofs of the most spectacular dialectics concerning a philosophical question whatsoever, gaining thereby nothing for themselves”.19 As an antidote to thinking in mere abstractions, Robert Tengström recommended a return to Hegel’s living dialectical method, against the revolutionary consequences of which the Master himself had been on his guard. He stressed—in accordance with the opinion expressed already by David Friedrich Strauss and Feuerbach—that philosophy did not have any particular task to accomplish anymore. This meant de facto that Robert Tengström placed himself among the Left Hegelians, since their slogan was, that the abandonment of philosophy (or at least the speculative philosophy) and passing into the practice was now the order of day. Marx formulated the trend by famously declaring in the last of his Theses on Feuerbach, that philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world, although the point is to change it. These ideas already potentially transgressed the horizon of a liberal civil society for which Snellman tried to give a Hegelian justification. But first in the summer months of 1847 in Paris Robert Tengström could experience the electrifying atmosphere of an imminent revolution. He reported, full of enthusiasm, from the capital of France about his experiences to the father, the philosophy professor: “One feels to be inside the workshop where history is made […] The ghosts of Voltaire, Rousseau and Diderot are again in motion, predicting a storm”.20 He continued, trying to dispel the possible troubles of the

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father: “[You] should not wonder at my sudden turn towards a critical Hegelianism, in case you think my view on philosophy is otherwise grounded. In Helsinki, I was yet too much bound with the system and could not properly direct my interest to practical questions. Now I believe I have in this respect taken a step forward – the step which philosophy itself is taking at the moment”. In the same letter, Robert continued: whole the recent German speculation, insofar it moves on pure philosophical ground, looks in my eyes completely a kind of scholasticism, a stiff and pedantic formalism […] On the other side, one cannot deny that the critical current in Hegelian philosophy, both in religion and politics, has a great significance, and with all probability one must assume that this current must be carried forward in a much deeper and extensive manner than hitherto, before the atmosphere has become so purified that a new philosophical system is able to take shape.

Robert Tengström sketches even in a few words a programme for the reform of philosophy: I do not believe that the present-day reality is able to produce new speculation, and if one observes the big gulf which more and more opens between the rational and the real, he must constate that it is to be filled first […] Philosophy must yet become a pathos, it must step down from the head to the heart [Återstår ännu för filosofin att bli patos, att stiga ner från hufvudet till hjärtat ].21

If one wants to speak about Finnish Left Hegelianism, so this letter from 1847 and Robert Tengström’s travel diary are almost the only sources where it is documented. He was taking the same step from theory to practice which was the demands of the time for the Left Hegelians. Actually, he seems to think that the programme of the Left Hegelians is yet insufficient. Especially interesting is the formulation in his letter about how philosophy “must step down from the head to the heart”. It echoes Marx’s famous sentence from his Introduction to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law about the philosophy of the head and the proletariat as the heart of emancipation.22 On the other side, Tengström wrote in the same letter to the father about how “philosophy must become a religion”, and although he hastened to add that with “religion” he does not mean a belief in dogmas,

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but rather the fact that les grandes pensées vienennt du coeur, these inconsequences expressed in the letter are a token of that the thoughts of the young philosopher had not yet managed to crystallise. It is clear, however, that Robert Tengstöm’s ideas had become too advanced to find any foothold in Finland, if he had returned to his native country. But he fell unexpectedly ill of “nerve fever” (in modern medical terms, probably typhus) and died in Paris on the 13th of November, 1847. He was buried in the Montmartre cemetery, and Snellman published an obituary of his young friend in his journal Litteraturbladet yet at the end of the same year. Despite his young age, Robert Tengström had in Helsinki already became known as a connoisseur of Hegelian aesthetics and Finnish folk poetry. He published two academic dissertations on Hegel’s “Metaphysics of the Beautiful” (Doctrina philosophiae Hegelianae de essentia artis pulchrae and De metaphysica Pulchri indole, both in 1846),23 and in addition analyses of Finnish folk poetry. The first of them, Finska Folket såsom det skildras i Kalevala (The Finnish People as described in the Kalevala) was published in 1844 and subjected to severe critique by Snellman, who did not like Robert Tengström’s idea that Finnish folk poetry originally reflected a cult of nature’s forces; another study, published a year later, already found Snellman’s approval.24 We need not here go into the details. But it is interesting to note, that the intellectual development of Robert Tengström followed a pattern which was similar to that of Marx and probably was not so rare among the 1840s generation: first, an interest in folk poetry and Hegel, and then, a shift towards social critics and politics. We can only speculate what it would have become of Robert Tengstöm if he had lived longer; maybe he would have written just such a book on critical aesthetics that Marx had planned under the influence of Köppen and Finnish folk poetry.

1854–1856 Next time Finland is glancing past the horizon of Marx (and Engels), it happens in an entirely different context. The Crimean War broke out in Spring 1854, when England and France decided to stop Russia’s expansion on the expense of Turkey. The main war theatre was in the South, but the English sent a navy squadron to the Baltic, too, in order to threaten St.Petersburg, and Finland was thus affected by a war which for the most was waged far away. The war was a big media happening of the epoch,

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followed by an abundant flock of journalists even in the North.25 Marx and Engels were at this time contributors to several more or less liberal or left-leaning journals and newspapers, of which the New-York Daily Tribune was the most important, and commented on several occasions on the events in Finland. Their comments focused mostly on the war incidents themselves and only occasionally on the inner developments in Sweden, Finland or Russia. Already in February 1854, a little before the Western powers’ war declaration to Russia, Engels commented in the New-York Daily Tribune on the political situation and England’s and France’s strategy in the Baltic area: The measures to be taken in the Baltic are as self-evident as those in the Black Sea. They consist in an alliance, at any price, with Sweden; an act of intimidation against Denmark, if necessary; an insurrection in Finland, which would break out upon landing a sufficient number of troops and a guarantee that no peace would be concluded exept upon the condition of this province being reünited [sic] to Sweden. The troops landed in Finland would menace Petersburg, while the fleets would bombard Cronstadt…26

A month later, Marx wrote about the political prospects of the Baltic War in The Zuid Africaan using almost identical expressions.27 He and Engels wrote their newspaper articles in collaboration and copied freely from each other. Both had in every case already at the outset of the war a clear concept of how the Western powers should proceed in order to weaken Russia. They of course did not have any illusions about France’s and especially about England’s politics, but as they nevertheless regarded Russia as the pillar of European reaction, the harder the Czarism was hit, the better. Due to its geopolitical situation, Finland was not unimportant: its vicinity to the Russian capital simply called for a strategy to disattach it from Russia, if possible, with the aid of Sweden. However, a closer look at the realities reveals soon, that Marx and Engels had in this initial phase trusted too much in the information they had taken from pro-Western sources. An important miscalculation was that they did not take into account the Swedish-Russian agreement of 1812. In that year, Czar Alexander I and the Swedish crown prince, later King Charles XIV met in Turku and agreed, that Sweden does not attempt to get Finland back, but will be content with Norway, which she had in the aftermath of Napoleonic wars got as a compensation for Finland. The agreement of

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1812 proved very important and it has actually until the present been one of the cornerstones of Swedish neutrality. But it did not take a long time before Marx and Engels could note that they had been furnished with one-sided information about the political realities in the Baltic area. Already in an article in The People’s Paper published in May 1854, Engels begins to suspect that the political manoeuvres of the Western powers do not have chance to become realised: Then, there cannot now be brought up any effective land-force in the Baltic before the end of June […]. This shows clear enough, that all serious and decisive attacks upon Baltic Russia are out of the question for the present year; it is too late. Only when Sweden joins Western Powers, have they a base of operations in the Baltic which will admit of their carrying on a winter campaign in Finland. But here again we have a vicious circle, though vicious only […] for the pusillanimous. How can you expect the Swedes to join you, unless you show them by sending a land-force, and taking part of Finland, that you are in earnest? And, on the other side, how can you send that force thither without having made sure of Sweden as a base of operations?28

The “vicious circle for the pusillanimous”, of which Engels here speaks with displeasure, was in fact a token of that Sweden was not ready to give up her neutrality in order to plunge herself into a war adventure with a very uncertain outcome. Even in case the conjuncture at the moment seemed favourable, that is, if the Western powers had won and Sweden would have got Finland back, this would have led to a geopolitical situation so intolerable for Russia, that she would sooner or later again start a war to conquer Finland. The whole affair would for Sweden have been but a bad repetition of the eighteenth-century wars with Russia, which had no positive outcome. Thus, when Marx in September 1854 described in an article in NewYork Daily Tribune the results of the conquest of Bomarsund (a fortress the Russians had built on the Åland Isles), he already is full of scepticism and fends off the optimistic speculations of Western press that Sweden might be drawn into the war and Finland into a rebellion: “The French Siècle has announced, and its announcement was echoed by many journals, that Sweden would presently join the Western powers against Russia in active measures. The probabilities of this announcement may be measured by the fact that Sweden concluded a treaty of armed neutrality

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at the very time it might have operated with success against the swamps and woods of Finland.”29 Engels, too, wrote of the same subject to the same newspaper and constated, that Sweden hardly will annex Åland, despite the fact that the Western powers had managed to chase off the Russians from the isle: Bomarsund being taken, the question next arises, what is to be done with it? According to the latest dispatches from Hamburg, at a council of war held by the Admirals, the General-in-Chief of the expeditionary troops and the principal commanders resolved upon destroying all the fortifications and abandoning the island, if Sweden should not be inclined to occupy it and buy it at the price oif a declaration of war against Russia […] The Swedish Court hesitates, the Swedish press warns the people against the Danaos et dona ferentes, but the Swedish peasants have already passed a motion that the Chamber should petion the King to take steps that Aland never again become Russian. There is little probability that the petition of the peasants will be listened to, and we may expect soon that the fortress has been blown up.30

Engels guessed right: the fortress of Bomarsund which the Russians had built as a lock for the northern Baltic, was blown up by the English soon after it was conquered, after Sweden had declined the offer to take it over. When the English fleet thereafter changed its tactics and began to terrorise the civilian population in Finland, burning several small coastal cities, this resulted in a sharp turn of public opinion against the Western powers. Marx disapproved of these tactics. In an extensive article from Sping 1855, which concentrated on trashing the English prime minister Lord Palmerston, Marx enumerated among Palmerston’s sins that “in the Baltic, Finland has become chained more tightly to Russia by useless and fruitless arsons”.31 After the war, The New-York Daily Tribune published an unsigned article, which is taken into the MEGA by its editors, although its authorship is somewhat insecure. If it is written by Marx, the text seems to have been revived in the redaction of The New-York Daily Tribune. In every case, it fits well in with Marx’s previous articles and its last paragraph is interesting, because now the geopolitical realities of the Baltic area are acknowledged and it is noted that Sweden’s previous wars with Russia have all been calamitous for the country:

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Moreover, the course formerly taken by Sweden at the instigation of England, proved fatal to the Vasas [the Swedish royal family – V.O.] and to the country itself. In 1809 England allured Gustavus IV., by a subsidy of $ 7,000,000, to declare war against Russia. England then abandoned her ally, or at least did not succor her. Russia, then an ally of Napoleon, being provoked by the Anglo-Swedish alliance, invaded and conquered Finland, and Gustavus was obliged by the nation to descend from the throne […] Not that under present circumstances we would forebode a like calamity for Sweden, but the actual war does not yet menace the fall of Russia, and such a neighbor can in the long run render Sweden very uncomfortable.32

The article contains factual mistakes—the previous war with Russia began already in 1808, and the assaulter was Russia (at the instigation of Napoleon), not Sweden—but if its substance is written by Marx, so it is well in concordance with that the main crook of the plot is England, the country which according to Marx was since the eighteenth century had applied all the possible both diplomatic and military intrigues in order to secure its world dominance.

1863 Some nine years later, Marx again mentions Finland, now in the context of Bakunin’s plans to stir up a rebellion against Czarism. He writes in Summer of 1863 to Engels: ...Bakunin has become a monster, a huge mass of flesh and fat, and is barely capable of walking any more. To crown it all, he is sexually perverse and jealous of the seventeen year-old Polish girl who married him in Siberia because of his martyrdom. He is presently in Sweden, where he is hatching ‘revolution’ with the Finns.33

The information Marx had got was correct. Bakunin had in fact come to visit Sweden in the early Spring of 1863 after the unsuccessful Polish insurrection.34 He began an agitation, trying to turn the public opinion in Sweden to support a military conflict with Russia and managed to tie contacts with many prestigious Swedish intellectuals. There were some spectacular actions; for example, in May 1863 a lavish banquet was held in Hotel Phoenix in Stockholm to honour Bakunin, where the well-known journalist and novelist August Blanche held the main oration. Among the people which gathered around Bakunin and discussed his political plans,

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were some Finnish émigrées, of whom Emil von Qvanten (1823–1903) was the most active. Qvanten had already earlier published pamphlets, in which he pleaded for a reunification of Finland with Sweden. The authorities both in Russia and in the Grand Duchy followed these plottings, so unrealistic and dilettantish they may have been, with concern. The Finns became afraid that the reunification plans of the emigrants in Sweden would provoke the Russians to curb the autonomy of the Grand Duchy and tried to tone down the matter. The Ministry State Secretary Alexander Armfelt, who was in charge of Finnish matters at the court in St.Petersburg, wrote in late Autumn 1863 in an allaying tone to Snellman, who at this moment already had been appointed a Senator: “On sait fort heureusement que ces soidisantes correspondances de Finlande sont forgées à Stockholm par les gens de la troupe Bakounine et C:o”.35 Snellman, however, had already at an early stage understood that Finland’s future might be at stake if the Bakunist and émigré agitation would win more support. This was one of the motives behind one of the most famous articles Snellman ever had published during his journalism career. With the rubric Krig eller fred för Finland (War of Peace for Finland?), it was published in the Litteraturbladet in May 1863. Snellman condemns the “frightening light-mindendess” of those who speculate an adventurous war with Russia and stresses that Finland’s future depends on the ability to uphold a peaceful relationship with the big eastern neighbour. The Polish insurrection (which Bakunin for his part was fanning, too) was drowned in blood, which must, so Snellman, serve for the Finns as a warning example. But at the same time, Snellman underlined, that the Realpolitik towards Russia he was advocating should not be understood as servility in front of the Russian reaction, but as ensuring the future possibilities: A senseless and violent desire for reforms [an allusion to the Polish insurrection – V.O.] has […] made the destinies of people dependent of an arbitrary chance. I will dwell upon this in order to show, in which sense even a small nations can have its fate in its own hands. The reforms and the development must concur to the fluctuations of more or less favorable circumstances of time. To determine them can often be out of reach of such nations, especially as even more powerful nations must accept the historical necessities. But a small nation, too, is able […] to preserve what it already possesses, and therefore to accept the necessity and endure it in a courageous manner, in order to keep an eye for the moment when the reform becomes possible.36

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Snellman applies here the dialectical figure of freedom as “recognition of necessity”. This Hegelian idea has actually since then been one of the cornerstones of Finnish policy towards Russia. It explains many peculiar traits of Finnish-Russian relations which have been preserved until recent times, such as the so-called “Finlandisation” phenomenon. It is interesting to compare this “Hegelian” strategy of Finnish bourgeoisie with Poland, another border state to Russia. Whilst the Finns followed the maxim bene vivit qui late vivit, the Poles had during the nineteenth century several armed uprisings against Russia, and were every time defeated. This is not the place to judge which of these strategies might have been better. But as to Bakunin’s plans to stir up rebellions in the border states of Russia, Marx and Engels, too, began from the mid1860s on to be fed up with his subjectivism and adventurism, and were soon engaged in a gruelling fight against the attempts of the Bakunists to gain influence in the International.

1871– During the second half of the nineteenth century, the name of Marx becomes already more known among the Finnish intelligentsia. I could yet mention Wilhelm Bolin, the chief librarian of the University Library in Helsinki, who was a friend and admirer of Feuerbach and ordered Marx’s Capital to the library as soon as it was published in 1867. But such allusions to Marx remained yet scarce. A real throughbreak of Marxism took place in Finland only when the Social Democratic Worker’s Party was founded in 1899 and assumed in its Congress 1903 a political programme which for the most part was copied from the Erfurt programme of the German socialists. A milestone in worldwide reception of Marxism was in the 1870s, and not only due to the publication of Capital (1st German edition 1867). The Paris Commune of 1871 was for the bourgeoisie of all countries a memento that the worker’s movement and socialism were a real challenge to their power. The Thiers government crushed the uprising of Parisian workers with a cruelty rarely seen, and many believed that the Commune was stirred up by the International. In the 1870s, the working class was in Finland not yet numerous, but the élite of the country was well aware, that the country had sooner or later encountered the same social problems of industrial capitalism which could already be seen in the more advanced West European countries. Uusi Suomi, the organ of the “Finnish” party

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(so-called in contrast to the liberals who were mostly Swedish-speaking) published in 1871, in the year of the Paris Commune, a series of articles on economic ideas of socialism, and in 1873 the liberal newspaper Helsingfors Dagblad already anticipated the future conflicts in the article “The Struggle between Capital and Labour”. The aged Snellman, too, took part in the discussion. In 1878 he had in the newspaper Morgonbladet an article published in two parts, with the short rubric “Socialism”, which seems to be the only text where he mentions Marx by name in the public. If one remembers the splendid journalism of Snellman in the previous decades, one cannot be but staggered to see how incoherent and carelessly written his article on socialism is. His old age alone cannot explain the quality of the text; rather, it seems that Snellman now has encountered a problem he cannot explain away with any amount of dialectics. He starts with the constatation, that there will necessarily always be some kind of social inequality. “It [the inequality] grows with the culture. The more a nation’s wealth increases, the greater riches will accumulate in the hands of private persons”.37 Snellman does not see in the doctrines of socialism any lofty cultural or theoretical content; it expresses only a crude material demand for equal distribution of goods. This is for Snellman a ridiculous demand, which he counters by telling an anecdote about Baron Rothschild, who was reported to say that if his wealth would be socialised, every German would get one thaler. But a depriming fact is that the people listen to the socialist agitators and not the voice of reason. Hence, Snellman ends with a resignation: If the matters stay as shortly described here […]so it seems to be but pure foolishness to believe that any argumentation against its doctrines would fell the socialist movement […] Abandoning the family ties and private property right, the socialism abandons the previous historical development of mankind and will replace it with the brand new invention of Lassalle, Marx, Bebel and Co.38

Thus, socialism does not go together with Snellman’s scheme of historical development, which was based on the idea that the accomplishments of culture (understood in the sense of the German term Bildung ) are the factor that leads humanity towards higher levels of civilisation. On the contrary, socialism seemed for the Hegelian idealist Snellman to be in its crude materialism to be dangerous for all the higher aspirations

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for humanity; hence the only remedy he could recommend were “draconically applied laws”, which would prevent that the “popular masses become a prey for agitators”—in which case the final solution must be let to the armed forces.39 The unhappy words of “draconic laws”, not to speak of “final settlement” of the social question by the army, show in a palpable way the limits of Snellman’s project of nation-building. The differences which were visible already in the Hegel interpretations of the young Marx and Snellman in the 1840s, have now, in the late 1870s, grown into an unsurmountable antagonism. Snellman seems to capitulate in front of the new forces, the workers’ movement and socialism. Is Snellman’s project of a Finnish nation thereby a failure? No, but it discloses now its bourgeois character, its bürgerliche Borniertheit, as Marx would have said. If Snellman ended in resignation, so his political heirs, the protagonists of the “Finnish party”, already took the contradictions of the coming capitalism for given and sought remedies to mitigate the coming class struggles. Yrjö Sakari Yrjö-Koskinen (1830–1903),40 the leader of the Finnish national party and one of the most important politicians of the country in the last decades of the nineteenth century, delivered an analysis of the new situation in an extensive article with the title Työväenseikka (‘The Worker Question’), published in the journal Kirjallinen Kuukauslehti in three parts during the year 1874. Yrjö-Koskinen begins by constating that “the worker question hs not yet appeared among us in the same form as elsewhere in Europe. Socialism has not been able to sow its weed and the International to spread its alliances here”. But, the writer continued, the Finns have no reason to boast, because “it is apparent that the only reason to this is the retarded economic situation of our country”.41 Next, Yrjö-Koskinen gives a short overview of the principles of the capitalist economy. The present-day reader probably will be astonished at noting, that although Yrjö-Koskinen belongs to the well-to-do bourgeoisie, he nevertheless does not paint a rosy picture of the capitalism to come. He writes that the so-called free concurrence is “nothing but a crude law of nature”, which creates a state of nature among men, the bellum omnium inter omnes. This “freedom of a wolf” is, according to Yrjö-Koskinen, nothing to strive at. “The task of the society is to take care, that in all areas of social life, consequently even in economics, the selfish interests are not allowed to take effect in a manner that the welfare of the weaker ones becomes ruined in this struggle or the progress of the

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society gets harmed”.42 The task of the State is to see, that the pursuit of private interests and class struggle do no destroy the social networks; the goal is “a sound progress of the entire people”.43 In his article, Yrjö-Koskinen is able to give a rather well-informed review of the history of socialist ideas, starting from Saint-Simon. It maybe is worth noting, that the most important theoretician of socialism was for him not Marx, but Ferdinand Lassalle; the “German Socialist Karl Marx” he mentions only as a leader of the International. YrjöKoskinen is, his critique of capitalism notwithstanding, of course not a socialist. However, as the Finnish sociologists Risto Eräsaari and Keijo Rahkonen remark, there are reasons to call him a Kathedersozialist. The “catheder socialism” was an academic current in late nineteenth century Germany, whose representatives defended the idea of a collaboration between labour and capital. Their activities were institutionalised in the Verein für Sozialpolitik which was founded in 1872. Many prominent members of the Finnish national party were adherents of the ideas of the “Catheder Socialists”.44 Marx, insofar he at all noted the existence of the Catheder Socialists, did not value them very highly. For example, of Wilhelm Roscher, one of the most prominent representatives of this current, Marx makes in Capital several rather slighting remarks.45 But the significance of the Catheder Socialism was for its Finnish adepts elsewhere than in its theoretical acuity: it prepared the Finnish nationalist bourgeoisie for a coming era of class struggles by preaching the collaboration between classes.

Notes 1. MEGA I/1, s. 851–854. 2. MEGA I/1, s. 852: “(Ich setze blos Stellen weis das Gedicht her, in dem sich recht die Naivetät der finnischen Volksanschauung bekundet)”. Marx uses the term “naive” obviously in the same sense as Schiller, i.e. as an opposite to “sentimental” poetry. 3. Erich Kunze, Kolmen suomalaisen runon esiintymisestä nuoren Marxin kansanlaulukokoelmassa, julkaisussa: Kalevalaseuran vuosikirja 27– 28/1947–1949, Porvoo—Helsinki: WSOY 1948, pp. 95–102. 4. Karl Friedrich Köppen, Literarische Einleitung in die nordische Mythologie, 1837. 5. K. F. Köppen, Friedrich der Grosse und seine Widersacher, 1840. “No doubt that the young student would not have accepted the views of this

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6. 7. 8.

9.

10. 11.

12. 13. 14.

15.

16. 17.

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text directed against the reactionary romanticism and Hegelian right”, Kunze comments (op. cit., pp. 98–99). Kunze, op. cit., p. 101. Ibid., pp. 101–102. Michael Heinrich, Karl Marx und die Geburt der modernen Gesellschaft, vol. I, Stuttgart: Schmetterling Verlag 2018, p. 249. Heinrich refers to a later (published in 1955) German version of Kunze’s article. Marx to Engels, 10th of May 1861, in: MECW vol. 41, pp. 287–289. The book Marx mentions is C. F. Köppen, Die Religion des Buddha und ihre Entstehung, Bd. 1–2, Berlin, 1857–1859. J. J. Tengström to J. V. Snellman 20. VI. 1844, in J. V. Snellman, Samlade arbeten, Helsingfors: Statsrådets kansli 1994, bd. IV, pp. 600–601. Actually, already before Snellman received the letter from Tengström, some hazy rumours about a new “journal of Ruge” had come to his ears, since in the end of May 1844 he had written to Tengström: “Furthermore, I have heard from Intelligensbl[adet] that Ruge’s journal in Paris has begun its path with good prospects. Let us hope that he does not think too much of himself and does not give free hands for the German enthusiasm for’pro et contra’, because in that case all will be left as it it” (Snellman to Tengström, 28, 30. V. 1844, Samlade arbeten IV, p. 587). Intelligensbladet was a Swedish literary journal; at this time, it was edited by Fredrik Georg Afzelius, one of the few Swedish Hegelians. J. V. Snellman, Tyskland, skildringar och omdömen från en resa 1840— 1841, Stockholm: L. J Hierta 1842. See Raimo Savolainen, Med bildningens kraft. J. V. Snellmans liv, Helsingfors: Svenska Litteratursällskapet i Finland 2019, p. 452. Jouni Alavuotunki, [Commentary to Läran om staten], in: J. V. Snellman, Samlade arbeten, vol. III, Helsingfors: Statsrådets kansli 1993, pp. 764– 765. Marx & Engels Collected Works vol. 3, p. 187. The Introduction to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law was published in the one and only issue of Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher. Quotation here according to Juha Manninen, Marx ja Väinämöisen soitto, in: Tiede ja Edistys 2/1983, p. 5. Abraham Herman August Kellgren (1822–1856) was a Finnish literate, poet and later professor of Oriental literature at the University of Helsinki. He was the addressate of Arppe’s above quoted letter fron 1845, where Marx was mentioned, so it is very probable—as Manninen remarks (op. cit., p. 5)—that Robert Tengström, too, knew of its content. Quote from Robert Tengström’s travel diary, published by Gunnar Castrén, Robert Tengström, in: Skrifter utgifna af Svenska Litteraturtsällskapet i Finland – Förhandlingar och uppsatser 17. Helsingfors 1903, p. 69.

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19. Castrén, op. cit., p. 69. 20. Robert Tengström to J. J. Tengström, 6th of July, 1847, in: Castrén, op. cit., p. 78. 21. Castrén, op. cit., p. 77. 22. Even a direct influence is possible, since, as mentioned in Footnote 17, Robert Tengström’s travel fellow Kellgren was the adressate of the letter of Arppe, where the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher was mentioned, the yearbook in which Marx’s article criticising Hegel’s Philosophy of Law was published. 23. It should maybe be mentioned, that academic dissertations in those times were usually small booklets, often of only a dozen pages. 24. Both articles were published in “albums”, text collections edited by young intellectuals; the first article in Joukahainen 1844, the second in Fosterländskt Album 1845. 25. During the Crimean War, Finland was often mentioned in the European and American press, but there is only little research about the “Finland image” of those days. An important work, nevertheless, is Märta Hirn’s Från Bomarsund till Sveaborg. Kriget 1854—1855, Helsingfors: Schildt 1956 (2nd edition 2004; Finnish translation Oolannin sota, Helsinki: WSOY 1956, 2nd edition 2004), which focuses on illustrations published in the Western press. 26. Friedrich Engels, The European War, (MEGA I/13, sp. 5); originally in: New-York Daily Tribune 2. II. 1854. 27. Karl Marx, The War in the East, MEGA I/13, p. 19; originally in: The Zuid Africaan, 6. III. 1854. Marx’s contribution is dated “London, January 14, 1854”, so that it maybe is written earlier than Engels’s article—or alternatively, the whole text is from the pen of Engels. 28. Friedrich Engels, The War, MEGA I/13, p. 250; originally in: The People’s Paper, 27. V. 1854. 29. Karl Marx, Revolution in Spain – Bomarsund, MEGA I/13, p. 407 (originally in: New-York Daily Tribune 4. IX. 1854). 30. Friedrich Engels, The Capture of Bomarsund (Second Article), MEGA I/13, pp. 414–415 (originally in: New-York Daily Tribune, 13. IX. 1854). 31. Karl Marx, Palmerston – Physiologie der herrschenden Klassen Grossbritanniens, MEGA I/14, p. 15 (originally in: Neue Oder-Zeitung 26. VII. 1855): “…In der Ostsee durch nutzlose und resultatslose Mordbrennereien Finnland besser an Russland ketten”. 32. The treaty with Sweden, MEGA I/14, s. 816 (originally in: New-York Daily Tribune 14. I. 1856). 33. Marx to Engels, 12th of September, 1863, Collected Works vol. 41, p. 492. The cursived words in the quotation originally in English in Marx’s German text.

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34. For more details, see Michel Mervaud, Bakunin, le Kolokol et la question finlandaise, in: Cahiers du monde russe et soviétique, vol. 7:1, 1966, pp. 5– 36. 35. Alexander Armfelt to J. V. Snellman, 18th of November 1863, in: J. V. Snellman, Samlade arbeten vol. XI.1, Helsingfors: Statsrådets kansli 1998, p. 676. 36. J. V. Snellman, Krig eller fred för Finland, in: Samlade arbeten vol. XI.1, p. 147 (originally in: Litteraturbladet № 5, May 1863). 37. J. V. Snellman, Socialismen, in: Samlade arbeten, vol. XII, p. 542. 38. Op. cit., p. 543. 39. Ibid., p. 548. 40. His initial name was Georg Zachris Forsman, which he, like many other protagonists of the national movement, turned into a Finnish form. 41. Yrjö Sakari Yrjö-Koskinen, Työväenseikka, reprinted in: Risto Eräsaari & Keijo Rahkonen (eds.), Työväenkysymyksestä sosiaalipolitiikkaan, Helsinki: Gaudeamus 1975, pp. 56–57. 42. Yrjö-Koskinen, op. cit., p. 60. 43. Ibid., p. 61. 44. According to Eräsaari and Rahkonen (op. cit., p. 42), “if anyone in Finland can be called a ‘Catheder Socialist’, so above all the Professor of Dogmatics A. F. Granfelt, Professor of History Y. S. Yrjö-Koskinen, Doctor utriusque juris W. Lavonius and Professor of Philosophy Th. Rein were Finnish Catheder Socialists. Besides that all the persons mentioned had at least a general positive attitude to this ‘new national-economic doctrine’ […], Rein told explicitely that he had ‘became fond’ of it […] during his studies in Leipzig, where he attended i.a. the lectures of Wilhelm Roscher. Their political activity […] gave a special pondus to these ideas”. 45. For example, in Capital , vol. III is an ironic footnote on “the sage Mr. Roscher”, Marx and Engels, Collected Works vol. 37, p. 322.

Provenience of the Texts

A part of the essays published here have an original form in some other language than English, although all have been rewritten for this collection. The provenience of the original texts is as follows: • Marx and Russia—yet an open theme—An earlier version published in Finnish in the symposion volume Marx ja Venäjä (ed. by Vesa Oittinen), Aleksanteri papers 1/2006 Helsinki, pp. 5–24 • Marx’s Theory of Ideology—from its Enlightenment roots to Russian discussions —Original contribution • The Marx—Mikhailovskij dispute—Original contribution • Hegel, Engels and the “People without History” —Paper presented in German at the International Hegel Congress in Tampere, Finland, in 2018; not previously published • Revolutionary Morality and Russian Experiences: Marx, Bakunin, Dostoevsky—A German version was published in Beiträge zur MarxEngels-Forschung (Neue Folge), 2012, pp. 39–51 • Marx, Nikolai Ziber and Primitive Economy—Paper presented at a seminar on Marx and Russia at the Aleksanteri Institute of the University of Helsinki in September 2013; previously not published

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 V. Oittinen, Marx’s Russian Moment, Marx, Engels, and Marxisms, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-29662-8

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• Marx and Finland—Finland and Marx—A Finnish version published in the electronic journal Ennen ja nyt 15/1, 2015 (https://journal.fi/ennenjanyt/article/view/108616), a Swedish version in Historiska och litteraturhistoriska studier 88, Helsingfors 2013, pp. 133–158. The article on Marx and Finland was originally intended as an introduction to a history of the reception of Marx’s ideas in Finland. The book project was, however, never realised. The article on Marx and Dostoevsky aroused polemics, and a reply on it can be read in the subsequent volume (2013) of Beiträge zur Marx-Engels-Forschung.

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Index

A Absolutism, 7, 10, 21 Analysis, 6, 7, 12, 15–17, 19, 20, 25, 27–31, 34, 56, 58, 60, 68, 75, 77, 101, 103, 104, 106, 113, 114, 117, 118, 122, 124–126, 134, 135, 138, 139, 147, 163 Anthropology, 61, 69, 71, 131, 132

C Camera obscura, 74, 76 Capital , 10, 14–16, 19–21, 23, 24, 26, 27, 29–31, 37, 39, 41–48, 51–56, 58, 60, 63, 64, 74–76, 78, 88, 93, 94, 96, 113, 129, 130, 132, 133, 141, 142, 161, 164, 167 Cartesian fallacy, 90 Communism, 21–23, 25, 29, 32, 48, 70, 71, 92, 124, 134, 136, 141, 151 Crimean War, 3, 4, 9, 106, 155

D Darwinism, 42, 58, 62 Decembrist uprising, 9 Determinism, 24, 55, 58, 59, 61 Dialectics, 17, 23, 25, 28, 30, 31, 38, 50, 98, 109, 132, 137, 139, 153, 162

E Enlightenment, 1, 2, 16, 61, 65–71, 73, 79, 91–93, 148 Evolution, 7, 23, 25, 57, 131, 137–139

F Fetishism, 74–77, 88, 96 French Revolution, 33, 102, 106

G German Ideology, 2, 5, 16, 58, 67, 70–72, 74–76, 79–82, 91, 100, 106

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 V. Oittinen, Marx’s Russian Moment, Marx, Engels, and Marxisms, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-29662-8

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INDEX

Grundrisse, 75, 132, 138, 144, 148

H Hegelians, 24, 28–30, 50, 51, 99, 101, 102, 105, 132, 138, 139, 146–151, 153–155, 161, 162

I Intelligentsia, 18, 32, 41, 44, 57, 133, 148, 161 International, The, 4, 14, 15, 18, 20, 45, 117, 120, 121, 125, 152, 161, 163, 164

J Jacobins, 21, 68, 91, 104

K Kalevala, 145, 155

M Marxism, 57, 59, 60, 62, 65, 66, 72, 80, 85, 91, 113, 114, 126, 129–131, 161 Marxism-Leninism, 66, 81, 100 Material falsity, 89, 90 Materialism, 5, 16, 58, 66, 69–71, 74, 79–81, 92, 93, 100, 102, 118, 162 Method, 17, 30, 31, 60, 61, 74, 82, 83, 113, 116, 129, 131, 138, 153 Morality, 92, 114, 115, 118, 119, 122–125

N Narodnaya volya, 14, 21

Narodniks, 13, 17–19, 21, 24, 26, 31, 32, 34, 38, 42, 56, 57, 59, 60, 107, 114, 133, 134, 150 Nation, 3, 7, 9, 10, 24, 51, 54, 97–99, 101, 102, 104, 105, 108, 109, 146, 151, 162 Negation of negation, 28, 30, 141 Nordic mythology, 146 Norman theory, 4

O obshchina, 18, 19, 21–25, 28, 29, 32, 56, 59, 133, 134, 139, 140

P Pan-Slavism, 4, 12, 53, 54, 104–108, 111 Peasant commune, 8, 56, 59 Positivism, 18, 114 Primitive accumulation, 24, 47, 51, 54

R Revolution, 1, 3, 4, 6, 9, 10, 13, 19, 21, 28, 29, 31–35, 53, 68, 85, 97, 99, 101–108, 116, 149, 150, 153

S Serfs, serfdom, 2, 7, 8, 11, 13, 16, 19, 43, 44, 139, 147, 150 Slavophiles, 21, 41–43 Slavs, Slavic nations, 97, 100–108, 110 Subjective sociology, 18, 24, 39, 59–61 Subject, subjectivity, 5, 17, 22, 32, 65, 69–71, 74, 77, 80, 83, 84, 90, 91, 98, 99, 135, 144, 158

INDEX

Superstructure, 21, 38, 72, 79, 80, 86, 95 Sweden, 8, 36, 150, 156–160

T “Tatar yoke”, 6 Terrorism, 126

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W West, Western Europe, 1, 2, 4, 7, 9–11, 13, 15–18, 23, 29, 31, 41–44, 53–55, 91, 122, 130, 139 World outlook, 16, 32, 65, 80–82, 117, 118, 126 Z Zapadniki, 41–43