Late Marx and the Russian Road. Теодор Шанин

the German Social Democratic Workers’ Party, with an explicit expectation that Russia would follow a similar route. Their conceptual ‘Europisation’ and increasing conversion to ‘Westernism’, i.e. the type of strict evolutionism we would call today a marxisan Modernisation Theory, meant that the Russian peasant commune, and by the 1890s the peasantry in toto, were to them no longer an asset but a sign of backwardness and stagnation, a reactionary mass. All of that had to be first removed to clear the way for the proletariat and its revolutionary struggle, and the sooner the better. They were consequently to watch with eager anticipation the development of capitalism in Russia – once more – the sooner the better, for the advance of socialism. It was to that vision that Marx referred in 1881 derisively as that of the ‘Russian capitalism admirers’.²⁴ His own views were moving in an opposite direction.

      Archaic commune and forerunner theory

      In 1881 Marx spent three weeks contemplating, one can say struggling with, an answer to a letter concerning the Russian peasant commune. It came from Vera Zasulich, made famous by her earlier attempt on the life of a particularly vicious tsarist dignitary, currently of the Black Repartition group and the future co-editor of the marxist Iskra. The four drafts of the reply Marx wrote testify to the immensity of work and thought which underlay it – as if the whole last decade of Marx’s studies with its 30,000 pages of notes but no new major text finalised, came together. The drafts are testimony of puzzlement but also of a growing consciousness of and the first approach to a new major problem. It is a veritable display of ‘the kitchen’ of Marx’s thought at a frontier of knowledge at which he, once more, found himself a forerunner to his own generation and friends.

      The discovery of the peasant commune by the Russian intelligentsia led to a sharp debate about its nature and historiography. To its detractors, the peasant commune was a creation of the tsarist state, to police and tax the countryside, a device which conserved the backward (‘archaic’) characteristics of Russian agriculture and its political economy in toto.²⁵ To the populists and their academic allies, it was a survival of the social organisation of primary communism, i.e. of the pre-class society, a remnant to be sure but a positive one, both in its present function and future potential. Behind the furious debate about historiography of the commune stood fundamental political issues of strategy, of the class nature of the revolutionary camp, its enemies and even of the nature of the future (post-revolutionary?) regime. To Marx the issue of the peasant commune, significant as it was for Russia, was also a point of entry to a variety of issues of much broader significance, theoretically and politically. These were the issues of peasantry within a capitalist (capitalism-centred?) world, and the type of sub-worlds and sub-economies such ‘irregularity’ is bound to produce. It was also that of the socialist revolutions in the world at large, i.e. of the ‘peasant chorus’ without which, he said once, the proletariat’s ‘solo song, becomes a swan song, in all peasant countries’.²⁶

      Already in the Grundrisse (1857) Marx had undertaken extensive comparative studies of peasant agriculture and of communal land-ownership within the major pre-capitalist modes of production. The peasant commune was not to him (or to the revolutionary populists) exceptional to Russia. It was simply the best preserved one in Europe – persisting for sound ‘materialistic’ reasons and by then increasingly placed in a new international and local context of advancing capitalism. Still in 1868 in a letter to Engels he was clearly delighted with ‘all that trash’, i.e. the Russian peasant communal structure ‘coming now to its end’.²⁷ During the 1870s the works of Mourer and Morgan strengthened Marx’s conviction, however, as to the positive qualities of the primary-tribal communities in their ethnocentricity (i.e. their concentration on human needs rather than on production for profits), and their inherent democracy as against capitalist alienation and hierarchies of privileges. The man of capitalism – the most progressive mode of production in evidence – was not the ultimate man of human history up-to-date. The Iroquois ‘red skin hunter’ was, in some ways, more essentially human and liberated than a clerk in the City and in that sense closer to the man of the socialist future. Marx had no doubts about the limitations of the ‘archaic’ commune: material ‘poverty’, its parochiality and its weakness against external exploitive forces. Its decay under capitalism would be necessary. Yet, that was clearly not the whole story. The experience and excitement of the Paris Commune – to Marx the first direct experiment in a new plebian democracy and revolutionary polity – was by now part of the picture. With the evidence of what appeared as the first post-capitalist experiment Marx was more ready than before to consider the actual nature of social and political organisation in the world he strived for. To all those steeped in Hegelian dialectics, children resembled their grandparents more than their parents. The ‘primary’ commune, dialectically restored on a new and higher level of material wealth and global interaction, entered Marx’s images of the future communist society, one in which once more the ‘individuals behave not as labourers but as owners – as members of a community which also labours.’²⁸

      Back from the past/future to the present, the consideration of co-existence and mutual dependence of capitalist and non-capitalist (pre-capitalist?) social forms made Marx increasingly accept and consider ‘uneven development’ in all its complexity. New stress was also put on the regressive aspects of capitalism and on its link with the issue of the state in Russia. The acceptance of unilinear ‘progress’ is emphatically out. The extension of an essentially evolutionist model through the ideas of Oriental Despotism is by now insufficient. Specifically, Marx came to see the decline of the peasant commune in Western Europe and its crisis, in Russia, not as a law of social sciences – spontaneous economic process – but as the result of an assault on the majority of the people, which could and should be fought. The consideration of the Russian commune in the drafts of the ‘Letter of Zasulich’ brought all this to the surface. It will be best to present the essence of the message in Marx’s own words.²⁹

      To begin with, ‘what threatens the life of the Russian commune is neither historical inevitability nor a theory but oppression by the State and exploitation by capitalist intruders whom the State made powerful at the peasant’s expense.’ The type of society in question was singled out by its international context, i.e. ‘modern historical environment: it is contemporaneous with a higher culture and it is linked to a world market in which capitalist production is predominant,’ while the country ‘is not, like the East Indies the prey of a conquering foreign power.’ The class-coalition of peasant-destroyers – the power-block in societies with peasant numerical predominance – was defined as ‘the state … the trade … the landowners and … from within [the peasant commune] … the usery’ (italics added), i.e. state, merchant capitalists, squires and kulaks – in that order. The whole social system was referred to as a specific ‘type of capitalism fostered by the state at the peasants’ expense’.

      To Marx the fact that the Russian commune was relatively advanced in type, being based not on kinship but on locality, and its ‘dual nature’ represented by ‘individual’ as well as ‘communal land’ ownership, offered the possibility of two different roads of development. The state and the specific variety of state-bred capitalism were assaulting, penetrating and destroying the commune. It could be destroyed, but there was no ‘fatal necessity’ for it. The corporate aspect of the commune’s existence could prevail, once revolution had removed the anti-commune pressures and the advanced technology developed by Western capitalism was put to new use under the communal control of the producers. Such a solution would indeed be best for Russia’s socialist future. The main limitation of the rural commune, i.e. their isolation, which facilitated a Russian edition of ‘centralised despotism’, could be overcome by the popular insurrection and the consequent supplementing of the state-run volost by ‘assemblies elected by the communes – an economic and administrative body serving their own interest’. That is, shockingly, peasants running their own affairs, within and as a part of socialist society. Indeed, the Russian peasants’ ‘familiarity with corporate (“artel”) relations would greatly smooth their transition from small plot to collective farming’ but there is a condition to it all: ‘the Russian society having for so long lived at the expense of the rural commune owes it the initial resources required for such a change,’ i.e. the precise reverse of ‘primitive accumulation’ was