Research in Political Economy: Marx's Capital and Capitalism; Markets in a Socialist Alternative. Volume 19

278 Pages·2002·15.35 MB·English

by  P. Zarembka

LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS
Martijn Konings Deparment of Political Science, York
University, Canada
Cheol-Soo Park Department of Economics, New School
University, USA
Ranganayakamma Sweet Home Publications, Hyderabad,
India
Alfredo Saad-Filho Department of Development Studies,
SOAS, University of London, UK
JCrgen Sandemose Department of Philosophy, University of
Oslo, Norway
David N. Smith Department of Sociology, University of
Kansas, USA
Thierry Such~re Institut Universitaire de Technologie du
Havre, France
James D White Department of Central & East European
Studies, University of Glasgow, Scotland
vii
NIKOLAI SIEBER AND
KARL MARX
James D. White
Of all the commentaries written on Marx's economic ideas, that of Nikolai
Sieber is practically unique in being endorsed by Marx himself. In the Postscript
to the second edition of Das Kapital Marx stated:
Already in 1871 Mr N.Sieber (Ziber), Professor of Political Economy at the University of
Kiev in his book Teoriya tsennosti i kapitala D. Rikardo .D( Ricardo's Theory of Value
and Capital, etc.) referred to my theory of value, money and capital in its general outlines
as a necessary sequel to the teachings of Smith and Ricardo. What surprises the Western
European reader on reading this excellent work is the consistent comprehension it shows
of the purely theoretical standpoint (Marx, 1872, p. 818).
As Marx was not apt to bestow credit lightly, this judgement on Sieber's book
was praise indeed. Even more compelling evidence of Marx's regard for Sieber
came seven years later, in 1879, when, commenting on a book by Adolf Wagner,
Marx noted:
Mr Wagner could have discovered, both from Das Kapital and from Sieber's work (if he
knew Russian) the difference between me and Ricardo, who in fact concerned himself with
labour only as a measure of value-magnitude and on that account found no connection
between his theory of value and the essence of money (Marx Engels Werke, 1962, p. 358).
In this note, which was not intended for publication and therefore reflected his
genuine opinion, Marx implied that on the question under discussion Sieber's
work was comparable to his own. In view of Marx's attitude to it, Sieber's
work is clearly of great significance for students of Marx's economic thought.
Despite this, Sieber is not well known and none of his writings have appeared
Marx's Capital and Capitalism; Markets in a Socialist Alternative,
Research in Political Economy, Volume 19, pages 3-16.
Copyright © 2001 by Elsevier Science Ltd.
All rights of reproduction in any form reserved.
ISBN: 0-7623-0838-9
4 JAMES D. WHITE
in English translation. The present paper sets out to explain who Sieber was
and to place his work in the context of the history of Russian Marxism. It also
attempts to place Marx's reception of Sieber in the evolution of Marx's
economic thought.
Nikolai Ivanovich Sieber was born on March 10 (22) 1844 in the village of
Sudak in the Crimea. His father was a Swiss who had settled in Russia, his
mother being a Ukrainian of French descent (Ianzhul, 1894, p. 581). (The
spelling 'Ziber' is the Russian transliteration of Sieber). Although Sieber was
brought up in Russia and thought of himself as a Russian, he remained a Swiss
subject throughout his life. He was educated at the high school in Simferopol
and entered the law faculty of Kiev University in 1863. In Russian universities
at that time economics was a subject that was often taught as part of a law
degree, and it was in this way that Sieber began his economic studies. He was
fortunate to have as his teacher Nikolai Bunge, who later became the Minister
of Finance under Alexander III (Kleinbort, 1923). Bunge was an adherent of
the Smith and Ricardo school, but was also very receptive to the latest
developments in economic thinking. He exercised a strong influence on Sieber
and fostered his interest in economics. Sieber graduated from Kiev University
in 1866, and, encouraged by Bunge, decided to embark on an academic career,
and to specialise in the study of political economy.
Sieber's postgraduate studies had to be postponed for a year, however, as he
had to wait for a grant to become available. Consequently, for eight months
Sieber worked as an arbiter of the peace (mirovoi posrednik) in the province
of Volhynia before returning to Kiev University. The function of a mirovoi
posrednik was to implement at a local level the peasant reform which had been
promulgated by Alexander II in 1861, and see to it that relations between
the newly liberated peasants and the landowners were settled peaceably.
When Sieber took up the post, peasant allotments were being readjusted in the
aftermath of the Polish uprising of 1863. In order to win over the peasants in
the South Western provinces to its side, the Russian government had revised
the terms of the 1861 legislation giving the peasants more generous land
allotments and on more favourable terms (Zaionchkovskii, 1968, p. 214). Sieber
was involved in putting the amended agrarian legislation into effect. The
first-hand experience of working in the countryside could not but give him an
insight into the workings of peasant communities - something which he was
later to write about extensively.
Discussions surrounding the peasant reform had formed an important element
in Russia's intellectual climate of the 1860s. It was the general opinion that
liberating the serfs was the first step towards Russia's developing a capitalist
economy, like those of advanced countries of the West. The framers of the
ialokiN rebeiS dna lraK xraM 5
1861 legislation had no doubts that Russia was destined to have a capitalist
future; they only feared that capitalism would be introduced too precipitously
and destabilise the country. As a result, built into the reform legislation were
measures specifically designed to slow down the development of capitalism.
Peasant communities were to be preserved intact to impede peasant mobility.
It was expected, however, that in the long term these peasant communes
would be dissolved by the inroads of the capitalist economy. One of the few
voices to be raised in protest at this scheme of things was that of Nikolai
Chernyshevskii, who deplored the projected demise of Russian peasant collec-
tivism and the emergence of an economic system based on selfish individualism.
Chemyshevskii was critical of the peasant reform and of the capitalist economic
system which it was intended to introduce. He wrote extensively on the subject
during the 1860s, one of his main works being a critique of classical economics
which took the form of a commentary on John Stuart Mill's Elements of Political
Economy. Marx was familiar with Chemyshevskii's work and in the same
Postscript to the second edition of Das Kapital as he had praised Sieber's book
he commented very favonrably on Chernyshevskii's work on Mill.
In 1868 Sieber took his master's examination and returned to Kiev University
to commence his postgraduate studies. The master's examination was an oral
one, and on this occasion the examiner was Bunge, who asked him to outline
the economic theory of Karl Marx, whose book had just appeared. Sieber had
assimilated Marx's ideas and gave a good account of himself at the examination.
He then proceeded to work on his master's dissertation, which set out to show
how Marx's ideas were an elaboration on the ideas of the classical economists.
The dissertation, entitled, David Ricardo's Theory of Value and Capital in
Connection with the Latest Contributions and Interpretations was presented in
1871 and published in Kiev in the same year (Ziber, 1871). It appeared a year
before Nikolai Danielson and Herman Lopatin's translation of the first volume
of Das Kapital into Russian, and was therefore the first introduction to Marx's
ideas for the Russian-speaking public.
After a study trip abroad, Sieber took up a teaching post in Kiev University,
and in 1873 was awarded the chair of Political Economy and Statistics. His
tenure of the post, however, was brief, for, in 1875 he resigned from the
university in protest at the dismissal of his colleague, the historian Mikhail
Dragomanov, for promoting Ukrainian national identity. Sieber left Russia
and settled in Switzerland, from where he continued his academic work and
sent articles to be published in Russian periodicals (Ovsianiko-Kulikovskii,
1923, p. 145).
No doubt encouraged by Marx's favourable response to his dissertation,
in 1874 Sieber began to publish a series of articles in the journal Znanie
6 JAMES D. WHITE
(Knowledge) under the general title 'Karl Marx's Economic Theory'. At the
beginning of March 1874, Danielson wrote to Marx informing him of this fact,
quoting Sieber's statement that the object of the series was to 'popularize the
economic theories of the author and analyze them critically'. Danielson had
found the articles highly commendable and was passing them on to Marx via
Lopatin .K( Marks, .F Engel's i revoliutsionnaia Rossiia, 1967, p. 311). The
series in fact continued to appear sporadically in Znanie until 1877, and when
that journal was closed down the series was resumed in Slovo (The Word)
during 1878. The four articles which appeared in Slovo were incorporated into
a revised edition of David Ricardo's Theory of Value and Capital dna the
resulting work published in 1885 under the new title of David Ricardo and
Karl Marx ni their Socio-Economic Investigations (Ziber, 1885).
Among Marx's published notes there is reference only to the first of Sieber's
articles in Znanie. It contains the sole point of criticism Marx found to make
of the article in question. This concerned Sieber's defence of Marx against Karl
ROssler, a German reviewer of Das Kapital, who had demanded to know why
it should be that 'the food in the stomach of a worker should be the source of
surplus value, whereas the food eaten by a horse or an ox should not'. To this
Sieber had replied that the subject of Marx's investigation had been human
society and not the society of domestic animals; therefore it had been concerned
only with the kind of surplus value produced by human beings. On this expla-
nation Marx commented:
The answer, which Sieber does not find, si that because in eht eno case eht food secudorp
human labour power ,)elpoep( dna in eht other - not. ehT value of things si nothing other
than eht relation in which people era to each other, eno which they have sa eht noisserpxe
of expended human labour power. rM R6ssler obviously thinks: if a horse works longer
than si necessary for eht production of sti (labour power) ,rewop-esroh then it creates value
just sa a worker would who worked 21 instead of 6 hours. ehT same could be said of yna
enihcam (Marx, 1927, .p 61).
This error, as it happened, was one that Sieber would later correct in articles
written in Marx's defence.
Sieber was to act not just as the popularizer of Marx's works in Russia, but
also their champion. He took up his pen to counter the attacks on Das Kapital
by two critics who approached Marx's book from the point of view of classical
liberal economics, Yu. G. Zhukovskii and B. N. Chicherin. In 1877 Zhukovskii,
a follower of Ricardo, published a lengthy review of Marx's Kapital in the
journal Vestnik Evropy (European Herald). Zhukovskii raised several objections
to Marx's work. As far as methodology was concerned, he had the impression
that Marx was still very much influenced by Hegel, so that his approach was
formalistic, paying insufficient attention to the actual content of economic
Nikolai Sieber and Karl Marx 7
affairs. Nor could Zhukovskii believe Marx's contention that only human labour
created surplus value. He was of the opinion that anything which bore fruit, be
it a tree, livestock or the earth, all were capable of providing exchange value.
For Zhukovskii one of the main sources of value was Nature. He thought too,
that Marx's account of the origins of capitalism, the expropriation of the
peasants and the formation of a proletariat, had a fortuitous quality about it;
Marx had traced the beginnings of capitalism in Europe to the liberation of
the peasantry without land, but this clearly implied that in other places, if the
peasants were not so liberated, then capitalism would not develop (Zhukovskii,
1877, pp. 67-72).
Sieber's reply appeared in the journal Otechestvennye zapiski (Annals of the
Fatherland) in November 1877. In regard to Zhukovskii's objections to Marx's
philosophical approach, Sieber conceded that Marx would have done no harm
by 'reducing somewhat the dialectical side of his exposition'. (Ziber, 1959b,
p. 562) But, on the other hand, Sieber pointed out, in the case of value, the
metaphysical approach was necessary, because in capitalist society perceptions
of value were metaphysical. Marx's treatment of the subject duly reflected this
fact. Sieber then explained how exchange-value represented the essential unity
of humanity through the prism of the division of labour and the fragmentation
of society (Ziber, 1959b, p. 564). In response to Zhukovskii's idea that exchange
value was created not only by human labour, but also by Nature, Sieber
emphasised that it was human labour which constituted the sole source of
exchange value, something, he added, that Zhukovskii as an authority on David
Ricardo, ought to know full well. Sieber was eager to defend Marx against
Zhukovskii's charge that he had presented the origins of capitalism as a fortu-
itous event rather than as a Natural process and quoted from the Russian
translation of Kapital one of the few passages in which Marx suggested that
the development of capitalism was a universal and necessary phenomenon.
In the following year the liberal historian, philosopher and political thinker,
Boris Chicherin published an article attacking Marx's Kapital in the journal
Sbornik gosudarstvennykh znanii (Compendium of Statecraft) (Chicherin, 1999).
The article was couched in much the same terms as Zhukovskii's had been,
and when he replied to Chicherin in Slovo in February 1879 (Ziber, 1879),
Sieber could note that both critics shared some key misapprehensions. In a
passage which brought out the metaphysical character of exchange value, he
observed:
But to people it appears as though things exchange themselves one for another, that things
themselves have exchange value, etc. and that the labour embodied in the thing given is
reflected in the thing received. Here lies the whole groundlessness of the refutations of
Mr Chicherin, and before him of Mr Zhukovskii, that neither the one nor the other could
8 JAMES D. WHITE
understand, or wanted to understand, as he should the circumstance that Marx presents to
the reader the whole doctrine of value and its forms not on his nwo behalf, but as the
peculiar way people at a given stage of social development necessarily understand their
mutual relations, based on the social division of labour. In fact, every exchange value, every
reflection or expression of it, etc. represents nothing but a myth, while what exists is only
socially-divided labour, which by force of the unity of human nature, seeks for itself
unification and finds it in the strange and monstrous form of commodities and money (Ziber,
,0091 p. 697).
Marx followed Sieber's literary output closely, and Danielson sent him the
journals in which articles by Sieber appeared, including Sieber's polemics with
Zhukovskii and Chicherin. Marx had certainly read Sieber's article against
Zhukovskii, and possibly that against Chicherin. Sieber was not the only
defender of Marx's Kapital against Zhukovskii. The editor of eynnevtsehcetO
,iksipaz N. K. Mikhailovskii, who had written a favourable review of the Russian
translation of Das Kapital in 1872, also wrote an article in reply to Zhukovskii's
criticisms. Mikhailovskii's defence of Marx, however, was not without its
reservations; it deplored the implication of Marx's 'historico-philosophical
theories' that Russia would have to endure the horrors of capitalism, 'the
maiming of women and children' so that the kind of collectivist society that
already existed in Russia could be created. This seemed to Mikhailovskii
illogical and unnecessary. Mikhailovskii's article appeared in eynnevtsehcetO
zapiski in October 1877 under the title of 'Karl Marx before the Tribunal of
Mr. Zhukovskii'. Danielson sent this article to Marx along with Sieber's replies
to Zhukovskii and Chicherin. On 15 November 1878 Marx wrote to Danielson:
of the polemics of Chicherin and other people against ,em I have seen nothing, save what
you sent me in 1877 (one article of Sieber, and the other, I think of Michailoffskii, beth
in the "Fatherlandish Annals", in reply to that queer would-be Encyclopedist .rM Zhukovskii)
(Marx & Engels, 1991, p. 343).
Marx drafted a reply to Mikhailovskii, denying that he had any such 'historico-
philosophical theory', repudiating the idea that the growth of capitalism
was inevitable in Russia and conceding that the founding of socialism on the
Russian peasant commune was possible and desirable (Marx & Engels, 1965,
pp. 311-313). One important factor in Marx's decision not to send the letter
was that Sieber had argued the very opposite, that the development of capitalism
was universal. Sieber's view in this respect was subsequently to become
the prevalent one among Marx's followers in Russia, Plekhanov and Lenin in
particular.
From the late 1870s Sieber began to turn his attention to the study of primitive
communities. It was a preoccupation which emerged from his commentaries on
Marx's economics, especially from the parts of Das Kapital which were devoted
Nikolai Sieber and Karl Marx 9
to the subject of cooperation, one of Sieber's own early interests. Sieber
explained the relevance of the study of primitive communes for Marx's
economics in 'The Theory of Social Cooperation', an article in Slovo in 1876,
which later became a chapter in David Ricardo and Karl Marx. In Sieber's
view, economists had given insufficient attention to the fact that the theory of
cooperation in the broad sense of the term was the theory of society itself.
Because of this, cooperation outweighed in importance all other economic
questions (Ziber, 1937, p. 538).
In noting the absence of a historical dimension in Marx's treatment of capital,
Sieber observed:
One can only regret that the author of Das Kapital, not wishing to broaden the scope of
his task, should have limited himself to studying the forms of labour combination and the
movement of these forms within capitalist society alone. That is why we do not find in his
work an account of the social cooperation at previous stages of economic developmem.
Even the feudal handicraft order, which gave rise to capitalist manufacture, is passed over
in silence. And yet it is precisely the knowledge of this order which is of enormous
importance for giving the necessary understanding of the capitalist modes of the succeeding
period. It is to be hoped that someone else will undertake the beneficent work of filling
where necessary this and other gaps left by Marx in the great series of changing forms of
social cooperation (Ziber, 1937, p. 360).
Sieber even suggested what kind of sources could be used for the purpose.
'What a mass of material', he remarked, 'having a bearing.., on the relations
of production of hunting, fishing, and nomadic peoples, lie buried in countless
travellers' tales' (Ziber, 1937, p. 377). This was the kind of material Sieber
himself was to employ when he embarked on his study of pre-capitalist forms
of social cooperation, Studies in the History of Primitive Economic Culture,
published in 1883.
Sieber's book appeared too late for Marx to have read, but there is every
reason to suppose that Marx was familiar with at least its main arguments. In
his memoirs the Russian economist N.A.Kablukov stated:
In the second half of 1880 1 lived in London, studying every day in the library of the British
Museum and spending some time in the company of N. I. Sieber, who was then working
on his book Studies ni the History of Primitive Economic Culture, on which we talked a
great deal. I went with him several times to visit K. Marx and F. Engels, who made us
very welcome and introduced us to their families (Russkie sovremenniki o K.Markse i
F.Engel'se, 1969, p. 78).
Marx himself referred to these meetings. In a letter to Danielson dated 19
February 1881, he wrote: 'Last month we had several Russian visitors including
Professor Sieber (he has now gone to Zurich) and Mr Kablukov (from Moscow).
They worked for whole days at a time in the British Museum' (Marx & Engels,
01 JAMES D. WHITE
1992, p. 64). It is likely that Sieber discussed his work on primitive communities
with Marx, who at that time had an immediate interest in the subject, as he
was in the process of drafting a reply to Vera Zasulich, who had written to
him inquiring if he considered the development of capitalism to be inevitable
in Russia.
Marx replied to Zasulich as he had to Mikhailovskii, that Russia might well
avoid capitalism if the country's present economic policies were changed. In
that case socialism in Russia could be based on the peasant commune. Sieber's
own attitude to this question was quite unambiguous. He regarded the peasant
commune as a pathetic relic of the past, doomed to destruction. He associated
Russia's progress, economic, political and cultural with the development of
capitalism on the European pattern. In reviewing V. P. Vorontsov's book The
Fate of Capitalism in Russia (1882), which warned that the development of
capitalism might dispossess the peasants without turning them into proletarians
and leaving them with no means of livelihood, Sieber agreed that the plight of
the Russian peasants was deplorable, but that capitalism was a necessary stage
in the 'general development of civilisation'. If there were no displacement of
people from the countryside to the towns, the concentration of population, the
building of railways etc., Russia would still be in the same condition as it had
been in the reign of Ivan the Terrible (Ziber, 1959a, p. 673). Sieber was quoted
as saying that 'Until the peasant is refined in the factory boiler nothing good
will come of him' (Mikhailovskii, 1909, p. 327).
Although Sieber believed that the development of capitalism in Russia was
inevitable and that the peasant commune would not long survive, he was deeply
interested in the way the commune had evolved and how it would eventually
dissolve and give way to capitalist relations. As one can see from the drafts of
his letter to Vera Zasulich and from the notes he made for his studies of the
Russian economy, Marx too from about 1870 onwards viewed the emergence
of capitalist relations in this way. The following generation of Russian disciples
of Marx, however, including Plekhanov and Lenin, disregarded the peasant
commune entirely, considering it to be a preoccupation of the 'Narodniki'.
Lenin's major work on the Russian economy, The Development of Capitalism
in Russia (1899) is the most obvious example of this kind of approach (Lenin,
1960).
Sieber was not himself a participant in the Russian revolutionary movement,
and he was rather dismissive of the revolutionary groups with which he was
familiar, the followers of Lavrov, Bakunin and Tkachev. According to his friend
Ovsianiko-Kulikovskii, Sieber's attitude was that they were 'good people,
but that they hadn't the slightest clue about scientific socialism or political
economy' (Ovsianiko-Kulikovskii, 1923, p. 146). Sieber abhorred terrorism, but
Nikolai Sieber and Karl Marx 11
understood why people resorted to it. On the other hand, he was deeply disturbed
by the political reaction in Russia following the assassination of Alexander II,
and even in his Swiss exile, felt himself threatened by it. Moreover, he was
irked by attacks on socialism, and felt impelled to come to its defence. His
polemics with Zhukovskii and Chicherin were inspired by this kind of sentiment.
(Ovsianiko-Kulikovskii, 1923, p. 146).
In 1884 Sieber fell ill with a degenerative disease, and returned to his family
in the Ukraine. He died in Yalta in 1888 aged 44 (Kleinbort, 1923, pp. 18-19).
The brevity of Sieber's life is one factor that ensured that he did not receive
the recognition he deserved as the pioneer of Marxism in Russia. In this respect
he was to be overshadowed by Plekhanov, who subtly undermined Sieber's
significance by suggesting that he did not understand dialectics, a verdict which
became enshrined in Soviet doctrine. Sieber's reputation in the Soviet Union
was also clouded because he belonged to the Ukraine and not Russia proper,
so that the honour of producing the first Marxist in the Russian Empire went
to the Ukraine rather than to Russia (Ziber, 1937, p. XLIV).
Nevertheless, Sieber's influence was considerable; it was from Sieber that
Plekhanov, Lenin and much of the revolutionary generation in Russia learnt
their Marxism. Sieber's work, particularly his David Ricardo's Theory of
Value and Capital provided an excellent introduction to Marx's thinking, and
smoothed the passage to reading Das Kapital itself. This is still true of Sieber's
book, and in this respect it is much to be regretted that Sieber's work has not
been more familiar to students of Marxism in the West.
On reading Sieber's dissertation it is difficult not to agree with Marx's verdict
on it; Sieber really does have an excellent grasp of the theoretical aspects
of Marx's work, and his exposition of it is a considerable achievement.
One has to remember that Sieber was working from the first German edition
of Das Kapital, which is much more Hegelian than the much simplified second
edition of 1872 and subsequent editions. In summarizing the first section of
Marx's book he had to negotiate some very complex terminology and concepts.
He did this adroitly, so that whereas most of the philosophy is excised in
Sieber's account, the essence of what the philosophical element conveyed is
retained. Sieber himself remarked that he thought the philosophical dimension
unnecessary:
This brief extract from the first chapter of Marx's work and the appendix to it at the end
of the book contains, if I am not mistaken, the most essential features of the author's doctrine
of value and the general properties of money. The peculiar language and the quite laconic
manner of expression does little to facilitate the comprehension of his ideas, and in some
cases has led to the accusation that he employs a metaphysical approach to the investigation
of value. With the exception of a few places in the chapter where perhaps some statements