Late Marx and the Russian Road: Marx and the "peripheries of capitalism"

296 Pages·1983·17.575 MB·English

by  Teodor Shanin

Monthly Review Press
New York
A case presented by
Teodor Shanin
(editor)
Late Marx and the
Russian Road
Marx and 'the peripheries of
capitalism'
Copyright © 1983 by Teodor Shanin
All rights reserved
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Main entry under title:
Late Marx and the Russian road.
Includes index.
1. Marx, Karl, 1818-1883.2. Communism
Soviet Union - History. I. Shanin, Teodor.
HX39.5.L363 1984 335.42'3 83-13237
ISBN 0-85345-646-1
ISBN 0-85345-647-X (pbk.)
Monthly Review Press
155 West 23rd Street
New York, N. Y. 10011
Manufactured in Great Britain
10 9 8 7 654 3 2 1
To Eric Hobsbawm
this book is gratefully offered
as a belated tuition fee
Dc omnibus dubitandum

Contents
Introduction lX
Part I: Late Marx
Late Marx: gods and craftsmen Yeodo,. Shanin 3
Marx and revolutionary Russia Haruki Wada 40
Late Marx: continuity, contradiction and learning
Derek Sayer and Philip Corrigan 77
Part II: The Russian Road 95
Marx-Zasulich correspondence: letters and drafts 97
Vera Zasulich: A letter to Marx (February 1881) 98
Karl Marx: Drafts of a reply (February/March 1881) 99
Karl Marx: The reply to Zasulich (March 1881) 123
David Ryazanov: The discovery of the drafts (1924) 127
Karl Marx: A letter to the Editorial Board of
Otechestvennye Zapiski 134
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels: Preface to the second
Russian edition of the Manifesto of the Communist Party 138
Karl Marx: Confessions 140
Marx after Capital: a biographical note (1867-1883)
Derek Sayer 142
The Russian scene: a biographical note
Jonathan Sanders 172
viii Contents
Part III: The Russian Revolutionary Tradition 1850 to 1890 179
Nikolai Chernyshevskii: Selected writings 181
The People's Will: Basic documents and writing::; 204
Marxism and the vernacular revolutionary traditions
'Feodor Shanin 243
Index 280
Introduction
Books ideally speak for themselves. A lengthy explanation of
contents may deflect attention from the book's goal, especially so,
in a volume which includes also papers of interpretation. This
introduction will be brief.
The mid-part of the book is mainly given to the drafts of Marx's
1881 discussion concerning rural Russia and some supplementary
materials. The iconoclastic nature of this extraordinary piece of
thinking aloud as against Marx's earlier views and later interpreta
tions, the peculiar history of those drafts, the relevance of them for
the so-called 'developing societies' of today, make these papers into
one of the most important intellectual 'finds' of the century. Their
first full and direct translation into English should enable the
readers to judge for themsc1ves the extent to which Marx's
magnificent originality, foresight and heretical elan stayed with him
to the very end. Bureaucrats and theologians of science in
whichever camp will not like it. Good! -
The book's first part offers some interpretations of Marx's work
at the last stage of its development, relating directly to the drafts
published. It is polemical and not of one cloth - in such matters
critical doubt and debate are essential. It was Marx who chose as his
favourite motto De omnibus dubitandum - 'doubt everything' - and
the drafts below offer living proof of how much he was true to this
principle. A way to honour his scholarship is to follow him in that.
The final part three of the book presents some materials which
come to trace the intellectual bridges between Marx's writings on
Russia and the Russian revolutionary tradition. It begins with
extracts from those writings of Chernyshevskii which influenced
particularly and explicitly Marx's own work. It then places before
Western audiences, for once verbatim, the major programmatic
and analytical statements of the People's Will - the Russian
indigenous revolutionary organisation of Marx's own time, and a
x Introduction'
group to which Marx and Engels have consistently referred till the
end as 'our friends'. The whole movement is remembered for its
heroic defiance and bombings, which seem to have obscured its
achievements in the realm of theory, namely, an alternative and
highly original view of society, state and revolution within the
specific social context they operated in. Also, their writings offer
insight into analysis which merged, rarely acknowledged,' into the
thought of late Marx as well as that of Lenin. Looking at the
subsequent century, one is struck by the contemporary potence of
many of those statements. It is as if the global history and human
society were only now catching up with many of the revolutionary
considerations and illuminations of the 1880s, both those of the
People's Will and Marx's own. A discussion of interdependence
between Marx's analysis and the vernacular revolutionary tradition
concludes both the section and the book while forming a link with
the consideration of the socialisms of the twentieth century.
Even on fIrSt perusal of the book, the reader should keep in mind
its assumption that the Russia of those times was a 'developing' or
'peripheral capitalist' society, in the sense attached to those terms
today - arguably the first of its type. It is only in that light that the
papers presented by Marx can be considered in their full contem
porary relevance. In the same light one can sec the fuller
significance of Marx's declared wish to use Russia for the Volume
III of Capital the way he used England in Capital, Volume I. Also,
there arc clearly different conceptions of Marxism, one of which
sees itself as consistent deduction from Capital, Volume I using
whichever empirical evidence is handy to defend its absoluteness
and its universality. The text which follows should help to
transform Marx's comment of the 1870s about himself 'not being a
Marxist' from a sly anecdote into a major illumination of Marx's
own Marxism as against that of the first generation of his
interpreters.
For the rest, the book will 'speak for itself.