Late Marx and the Russian road: Marx and the "Peripheries of Capitalism." - book reviews

Monthly Review, Dec, 1984 by Marc Edelman

This varied collection of primary source materials and interpretive essays provides fresh perspective on Marx's views about the possiblities for a socialist transformation in Russia and on his relations with the Russian revolutionaries of his day, particularly the populists in the People's Will (Narodnaya volya) and Black Repartition (Chernyi peredel) organizations. Included in the anthology are previously untranslated texts by Marx and by the Russian populists who influenced his thinking on Russia, as well as analytical chapters by Teodor Shanin, Haruki Wada, and Derek Sayer and Philip Corrigan. Beyond its relevance to the question of Russia, the "case presented" in Late Marx and the Russian Road is a forceful intervention in the larger debates over Marx's conceptions of historical process and the nature of contemporary peripheral capitalism. Taken as a whole, this volume should lay to rest whatever doubts may remain regarding Marx's opposition to unilineal and teleological notions of progress.

Certainly the most important institution in the late nineteenth-century russian countryside was the village commune (mir or obshcina). With the abolition of serfdom in 1861, emancipated peasants worked lands which belonged to the commune and which were periodically redistributed according to various kinds of egalitarian principles, such as the number of adult males or total members in a household. While farming was not carried out collectively, grazing lands and woods were generally for common use. Vestigial pockets of commune-like land tenure and political organization survived in western Europe, but the mir--which in underdeveloped peasant Russia included the overwhelming majority of the population--was unlike anything that then existed in the developed world. Probably for this reason, it figured not at all in Marx's analysis of capitalism in volume I of Capital. For the Russian revolutionaries of the late nineteenth cenytury, however, a key question was whether the structure of the mir could serve as a springboard for a direct transition to socialism.

The centerpiece of Late Marx and the Russian Road is the first complete English translation of Marx's 1881 drafts of a letter to the populist Vera Zasulich concerning the nature of the Russian peasant commune. Zasulich had attained considerable notoriety as a result of her 1878 attempt to assassiante the governor of St. Petersburg and her subsequent acquittal in a major political trial. The question she posed to Marx about the ultimate fate of the peasant commune in Russia went to the very heart of issues of revolutionary strategy and historical process that are still being debated in the third world today. If the rurual commune were freed of the exorbitant exactions of the nobility and the state and could develop "in a socialist direction," Zasulich wrote Marx, the logical approach for revolutionaries would be to work for "the liberation and development of the commune." If, on the other hand, the commune "is destined to perish" as a result of peasant proletarianization and land passing into the hands of the bourgeoisie, the task of revolutionaries would be "to conduct propaganda solely among the urban workers."

Judging by Marx's extensive 1881 drafts, the task of coming to terms with Zasulich's straightforward query was taken with the utmost seriousness. It is also apparent, as Shanin and Wada point out in their essays, that the drafts are representative of an evolution in Marx's own thought, one which reflected an intensive study of Russia in the last decade of his life. While in 1898 Marx had (in a letter to Engels) referred to the Russian peasant commune as "trash" that was coming "to its end," in the Zasulich drafts he attacks interpretations of his theory which emphasized inevitability and universality. The Marx of 1881 is unequivocal about the possibility that Russia might be able to skip the bourgeois stage of development. He maintains moreover that the analysis in Capital I was meant to apply only to Western Europe and that "the commune in its present form ... many become the direct starting-point of the economic system toward which modern society is tending; it may open a new chapter that does not begin with its own suicide." In Marx's letter to the editors of Otechestvennye Zapiski (Notes of the Fatherland), also included in the collection, he further remarks that if Russia continues along the road followed by the West, "it will lose the finest chance ever offered by history to a people and undergo all the fateful vicissitudes of the capitalist regime."

the circumstances surrounding the discovery and publication of the 1881 drafts help to explain why these historical particularist nuances in Marx's thought never had much impact on the later "Marxisms" of either his bourgeois detractors or his Stalinist epigones, both of which saw Marxism as a variety of universal "stage theory." The Zasulich drafts were found only in 1911 by David Ryazanov, later the first director of the Marx-Engels Institute. They were translated with Bukharin's help shortly afterward but were published only in 1924, after a delay of 42 years.