The Controversy Over Capitalism: Studies in the Social Philosophy of the Russian Populists

206 Pages·1969·2.944 MB·English

by  Andrzej Walicki

THE CONTROVERSY
OVER CAPITALISM

The Controversy
over Capitalism
STUDIES IN THE
SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY
OF THE
RUSSIAN POPULISTS
BY
A. WALICKI
OXFORD
AT THE CLARENDON PRESS
1969
, ,
Oxford University Press Ely House London W. i
GLASGOW NEW YORK TORONTO MELBOURNE WELLINGTON
CAPE TOWN SALISBURY IBADAN NAIROBI LUSAKA ADDIS ABABA
BOMBAY CALCUTTA MADRAS KARACHI LAHORE DACCA
KUALA LUMPUR SINGAPORE HONG KONO TOKYO
© OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS 1969
PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN
CONTENTS
I. THE CONCEPT OF POPULISM 1^
II. CLASSICAL POPULISM AND ITS
PREDICAMENTS 2Q
1. The Controversy about Progress 29
2. ‘Sociological Romanticism! 56
3. Socialism and Political Struggle 80
4. The Privilege of Backwardness 107
III. POPULISM AND MARXISM I32
1. Russian Populists in confrontation with
Marx and Engels 132
2. Plekhanov and the ‘Rational Reality 153
3. Populism and the Russian Marxisms of the
Nineties 165
4. Marx and Engels in confrontation with
Russian Populism 179

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
T his book was written in Oxford and owes much to a
number of people. First of all, I am greatly indebted to the
Warden and Fellows of All Souls College among whom I
was privileged to work—as a visiting Fellow—in the academic
year 1966/7. I can hardly exaggerate the debt I owe to
Professor Sir Isaiah Berlin who has discussed with me the
ideas contained in the book and who has helped me in many
other ways. I deeply appreciate the painstaking efforts of
my English friends—Mr. Harry Willetts, Mrs. Ellen de
Kadt, and Mr. and Mrs. Arlene and Anthony Polonsky—who
corrected the style of the book. I also wish to thank Mr.
J. S. G. Simmons who helped me to find everything that I
needed in the libraries of Oxford. Finally, I owe a real debt
of gratitude to all those who contributed to the stimulating
and friendly atmosphere which surrounded me during my
stay in England.
ANDRZEJ W ALICK I
Warsaw
April ig68

I
THE CONCEPT OF POPULISM
T his book was not intended to be a comprehensive study of
Russian Populism, its historical genesis, development, and
decay. We confined ourselves to some aspects of the ideology
of the classical Russian Populism and even within these limits
our approach is not the strictly historical one. However, we
are convinced that we have selected those aspects of Popu­
lism which are the most helpful for the proper understanding
of what it really was. The most essential characteristic
features of the full-fledged Russian Populism were revealed,
we think, in its attitude towards capitalism and towards
Marxism; towards capitalism and towards ‘Capital’.
Such an approach, however, needs a justification. First
of all, we must avoid terminological confusion. The term
‘Populism’ (narodnichestvo) has become associated with so
many different meanings that it seems necessary to begin
with the semantic question.
The need of a semantic inquiry into the history of the
term ‘Populism’ has been realized both in the Soviet Union
and in the West. It is significant that Boris Koz'min—the
scholar whose works have played the leading part in the
recent revival of the studies of Populism in the USSR—
thought it necessary to dwell upon the semantic problems
(although he had confined his inquiry to the word ‘Popu­
lism’ as used in the works of Lenin).1 In the West this
problem has been tackled by Richard Pipes who has given
a systematic and useful study of the history of the word
1 Cf. B. P. Koz'min, ‘Narodnichestvo na burzhuazno-demokraticheskom
étape osvoboditel'nogo dvizheniya v Rossii’, Istoricheskie zapiski, vol. lxv, 1959.
Reprinted in B. P. Koz'min, Iz istorii revolutsionnoi mÿsli v Rossii, Moscow 1961.
821474 B
2 THE CONCEPT OF POPULISM
‘Populism’ and who has derived from it an interesting,
though disputable, conclusion concerning the proper usage
of this term.1 This conclusion says, in short, that the concept
of Populism, as presented, among others, by Koz'min, is in
fact ‘a polemical device created and popularized by Marxist
publicists in the early nineties’ and, as such, has ‘no historical
justification’.2
The present author is fully aware that his own usage of
the term is closely bound up with precisely this concept of
Populism which Pipes has dismissed as being ‘historically
unjustified’. Nevertheless, Pipes’s article provides a useful
point of departure from which to clarify the conception of
Populism which we wish to present, and to justify, in this book.
On the face of it, wrote Pipes, the meaning of the term
‘Populism’ is obvious:
it describes an agrarian socialism of the second half of the nine­
teenth century, which upheld the proposition that Russia could
by-pass the capitalist stage of development and proceed through
the artel' and peasant commune directly to socialism. Its inspira­
tion came from Herzen and Chemÿshevskiï, and its strategy
from Lavrov, Bakunin, and Tkachev. It first manifested itself
overtly in the ‘going to the people’ movement, and reached its
zenith with the terror of the People’s Will, after which it quickly
lost ground to Marxism. This, as it were, classic conception of
narodnichestvo constitutes, for example, the framework of the most
recent and most extensive treatment of the subject, Professor
Venturi’s Populismo russo, originally published in 1952.3
It is to Pipes’s merit that he called in question this ‘classic’
or, rather, current conception of Populism. He has estab­
lished that the word ‘Populism’ has had two distinct and to
some extent contradictory meanings—the narrow historical
meaning and the broad Marxist one. The first of them he
accepts, the second he, apparently, wants to eliminate as
having been historically unjustified and ‘rejected by those
1 R. Pipes, ‘Narodnichestvo: A Semantic Inquiry*, Slavic Review, vol. xxiii,
no. 3, September 1964.
2 Ibid., p. 458. 3 Ibid., pp. 441-2.