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

Monthly Review, Dec, 1984 by Marc Edelman

While the 1881 drafts were apparently Marx's most extensive exposition of his views on Russia, the earlier discovery or publication of related material--such as the letter to Otechestvennye Communicst Manifesto (also included in this collection)--suggest that the reasons these views were ignored by a later generation of Marx's followers go beyond simple ignorance of the relevant texts. Already in 1879 the Russian populist movement had split and the Black Repartition group, which included such key figures as Zasulich and Plekhanov, opted soon after for an interpretation of Marxism which emphasized the necessity of a capitalist stage in Russia. With the formation of the Emancipation of Labor group, the direct precursor of the Russian Social Democratic Workers' Party, efforts were made, in Shanin's words, by "Marxists who kenw better than Marx what Marxism is ... to censor him on the sly, for his own stake." After the death of Marx, Plekhanov became Engels' principal guide to Russia, reinforcing the latter's tendecy to conceive history in unilineal terms and helping to maintain in oblivion the populist writers who had so influenced Marx's views on Russia. Finally, with the institutionalization of Marxism in the soviet Union after 1917, the requirements of state legitimation favored idelogical representations stressign the single forward march of progress.

Is it indeed true, as Shanin asserts, that Russian populism should be added to the German philosophy, French socialism, and British political economy, which Engels named as the key influences on Marx's thought? The texts in Late Marx and the Russian Road suggest that Marx's reading of the populists, especially the programmatic statements of the People's Will organization, did strengthen the particularist strain in his thinking and increasingly led him to view Russia as a variety of "Oriental despotism," a highly centralized bureaucracy "above" the peasant communes. One finds also, in contrast to both Soviet and Western critics of Marx's "Oriental despotism" thesis who charge that it does not constitute a class analysis, that the 1881 drafts contain an explicit discussion, drawn in part from the populist Chernyshevskii, of the concrete mechanisms through which the mir was exploited by the state, the landed nobility, and local merchants and users. It is interesting as well that Chernyshevskii's descriptions of the Russian laboring class as "peasants, part-time workers, and wage workers" has echoes not only in Marx's discussion of peasant differentiation in Russia, where he notes the devastating effects on the communes of the "world market in which capitalist production is predominant," but in contemporary analyses of third world underdevelopment.

Several other chapters of Late Marx and the Russian Road also deserve mention. Sayer and Corrigan's essay, while taking issue with Shanin's notion that the "late Marx" broke with an earlier evolutionism, agrees that the writings on Russia are "a major and scandolously neglected resource for socialists today." Marx's tongue-in-cheek "Confessions," appended to the Russians materials, provided a rare glance at Marx the man will disappoint those who may have hoped he was a feminist before his time. Jonathan Sanders' biographical notes on the populists and early Marxists in Russia are written with humor and a critical appreciation for those individuals and theoretical currents that were on the losing end of history. He describes, for example, the erudite Ryazanov telling Stalin not to make a fool of himself and the surreal spectacle of the engineer Kibal'chich, a bomb technician for the People's Will, awaiting execution in a Tsarist dungeon in 1881 and occupying himself with plans for jet-propelled flying machines. Unfortunately, Derek Sayer's sketch on "Marx after Capital," essentially a chronology of discrete items unconnected by linking sentences, does not read with the same ease. Nevertheless, it does list in one place the key moments in the development of Marx's views of Russia, something which the more synthetic essays by Shanin, Wada, and Sayer and Corrigan do not attempt to accomplish.