Материал: Karl Marx_ A Biography ( PDFDrive )

who openly state that the workers are too uneducated to emancipate themselves and must be freed from above by philanthropic big bourgeois and petit-bourgeois. If the new Party organ adopts a line which corresponds to the views of these gendemen and which is bourgeois and not proletarian, then nothing remains for us (much though we should regret it) but publicly to declare our opposition to it, and to break the bonds of solidarity which we have hitherto maintained in our representation of the German Party abroad. But it is to be hoped that things will not come to such a pass. . . . 87

However, the Jahrbtich only lasted for two issues and in September 1879 the Sozial-Demokrat was founded. According to Marx the new paper was 'not worth much'.88 There were still complaints about the infiltration of petit-bourgeois ideas and relations continued to be strained. This was owing more to the military tone of Engels than to Marx, whom Liebknecht (for one) found much easier to deal with.89 But the whole quarrel was patched up at the end of 1880 when Bebel and Bernstein undertook what they described as a 'journey to Canossa' to visit Marx and Engels. It was agreed that Bernstein should take over the editorship of the SozialDemokrat and, somewhat to the surprise of all, he made a success of it. (Marx's view of Bernstein is not recorded.) But for all his optimism about the future, Marx was very caustic about the rising generation. To take two examples: he remarked to Engels that Dietzgen's work was deteriorating and that he found the man's case 'quite incurable' j90 Kautsky (soon to become the leading Marxist theoretician in Germany) was stigmatised by Marx as 'a small-minded mediocrity, too clever by half (he is only twenty-six), industrious in a certain way, busies himself with statistics but does not derive anything intelligent from them, belonging by nature to the tribe of Philistines'.1"

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I Jntil 1875 Marx was extremely sceptical about the possibilities of revolution in Russia: his optimism immediately after the emancipation of the serfs in 1861 had been short-lived. In spite of the success of Capital in Russia and his admiration for individual thinkers such as Chernyshevsky, lie continued to think of that country as the mainstay of European 1 ruction, more amenable to outside pressure than to internal subversion. Hy the beginning of 1877 - with the growing tension between Russia and 1111 key - Marx predicted that the 'Eastern Question' would 'lead to 1 evolution in Russia, whatever the outcome of the war'.92 He and Engels loi lowed with great attention the Russo-Turkish War (which occupied the

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second half of 1877) though they were not accurate in predicting its outcome. Marx was 'highly elated over the strong and noble performance

i.e. the mass of the Turkish people - and got to know him as unconditionally one of the bravest and most moral representatives of the European peasantry',94 and that 'the defeat of the Russians in European Turkey will lead directly to revolution in Russia'.95 For Marx

this new crisis is a turning point in European history. Russia - and I have studied her circumstances from original Russian sources, both official and unofficial - was already on the threshold of a revolution with all the elements ready. It will duly begin with constitutional games and then there will be a fine explosion! Unless mother Nature is particularly unkind to us then we will still experience this joy.96

After the failure of the Turkish war to shake the Tsarist system, Marx pinned his hopes more and more on the possibilities of some revolutionary movement inside Russia. He had studied conditions in Russia in great detail - particularly in preparing Volume Three of Capital; with the success there of the first volume of Capital, it was natural that the growing Russian resistance movements should turn to him for advice - advice that

Populism - their essential characteristics being a will to act as the catalyst of a revolution based on the broad masses of the peasantry, and a desire to check the development of capitalism by finding a specifically Russian alternative.98

This question had been opened in 1874 by an open letter from Tkatchev, a Populist follower of Blanqui, which accused Engels of underestimating the revolutionary potential of the obchtchina, the traditional peasant commune. Engels' reply gave the impression that he considered a capitalist stage of development absolutely necessary for Russia: one of the leading Populist theoreticians, Mikhailovsky, attacked this position in 1877 - claiming that Capital involved a condemnation of the efforts of

more ambivalent than Engels', replied himself in a letter to the journal Notes on the Fatherland. He rejected Mikhailovsky's charge: 'If Russia

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continues to move along the path she has followed since 1861 she will lose the finest chance history has ever offered to a people and will undergo all the fatal developments of the capitalist regime.' And defending the chapter on 'Primitive Accumulation' in Capital he continued:

If Russia is tending to become a capitalist nation after the example of the West European countries - and during the last few years she has been taking a lot of trouble in this direction - she will not succeed without having first transformed a good part of her peasants into proletarians; and after that, once taken to the bosom of the capitalist regime, she will experience its pitiless laws like other profane peoples.99

In some marginal notes which he wrote on Bakunin's Statism and Anarchy at the end of 1874, Marx had already come to the conclusion that

Where the mass of the peasants are still owners of private property, where they even form a more or less important majority of the population . . . the following situation arises: either the peasantry hinders every workers' revolution and causes it to fail, as it has done in France up till now; or the proletariat. .. must as a government inaugurate measures which directly improve the situation of the peasant and which thus win him for the revolution; measures which in essence facilitate the transition from private to collective property in land so that the peasant himself is converted for economic reasons; the proletariat must not, however, come into open collision with the peasantry

by, for example, proclaiming the abolition of inheritance or the abolition of property.100

Thus Marx did not rule out completely the possibility of Russia's bypassing the capitalist stage of development and expressed great admiration for Narodnaia Volya ('The People's Will'), the terrorist wing of the Populist movement, whose express aim this was. Following the assassination of Alexander II in 1881 by the Narodnaia Volya, Marx described the terrorists as 'brave people with no melodramatic poses, straightforward, realistic and heroic'. T h ey were attempting to teach Europe that 'their method of operation is specifically Russian and historically unavoidable and that there is as little point in moralising argument for or against it as there is in the case of the earthquake in Chios'.1 0 1

Marx had much less respect for the populist exiles in Geneva (among them Plekhanov and Axelrod) who were opposed to terrorism and preferred to concentrate on propaganda: 'in order to make propaganda in Russia - they go away to Geneva! What a quid pro quo\ These gentlemen are against all politico-revolutionary action. Russia must leap with a salto mortale into a anarchist-communist-atheist millennium! Meanwhile they prepare this leap with a boring cult of doctrine... .102 It was one of the

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Lately [she wrote] we often hear it said that the rural commune is an archaic form condemned to perish by history, scientific socialism and all that is least subject to debate. The people who preach this call themselves your disciples par excellence-. 'Marxists'. The strongest of their arguments is often: 'Marx has said it'. 'But how do you deduce it from his Capital He does not discuss the agrarian problem nor Russia,' was the objection. Your disciples reply: 'he would have said it had he talked of our country.'105

Marx's short reply to this cri de coeur was sibylline:

The analysis given in Capital does not offer any reasons either for or against the vitality of the rural commune, but the special study that I have made of it, for which I have researched the material in its original sources, has convinced me that this commune is the starting point for the social regeneration of Russia, but that, in order for it to function as such, it would be necessary first of all to eliminate the deleterious influences that assail it on all sides and then to assure it the normal conditions for a spontaneous development.104

Brief though Marx's reply was, it was based on three very lengthy drafts which thoroughly analysed the development of the peasant commune and contained the more optimistic conclusion that:

To save the Russian commune, a Russian revolution is necessary. Moreover, the Russian Government and the 'new pillars of society' are doing their best to prepare the masses for such a catastrophe. If the revolution comes at an opportune moment, if it concentrates all its forces to ensure the free development of the rural commune, this commune will soon develop into an element that regenerates Russian society and guarantees superiority over countries enslaved by the capitalist regime.'os

In his last pronouncement on this question, the Preface to the 1882 translation of the Communist Manifesto, Marx reiterated this position: 'if the Russian Revolution becomes a signal for a proletarian revolution in the West, so that both complement each other, the present Russian common ownership of land may serve as the starting point for a communist development'.106 Thus Marx's doctrinal legacy on this vital question was fatefully ambivalent.107

In France socialism was slow to revive after the shattering experience of the Commune. By 1877 Workers' Congresses began to reconvene and the future leaders Guesde and Malon, both with former anarchist leanings,

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moved nearer to a sort of Marxism which they proclaimed in their newspaper UEgalite. In October 1879 the Federation du Parti des Travailleurs Socialistes was formed; and the amnesty of 1880 strengthened the socialists by permitting the return of exiles, among them Marx's two sons-in-law. In May 1880 Guesde came to London to discuss an electoral programme with Marx, Engels and Lafargue. Marx was by and large happy with the programme - to which he wrote the preamble - as it embodied 'demands that have really sprung spontaneously from the workers' movement itself,1 08 but he protested at the demand for a statutory mininum wage (which Guesde insisted on including). 'If the French proletariat is still so childish that it needs such bait, then it is not worth while drawing up any programme whatever.'109 He also drew up an extended questionnaire to be distributed among French workers, thus reviving an idea broached at the 1866 Geneva Congress of the International. T h e questionnaire was published in Malon's Revue Socialiste in April 1880 and 25,000 copies were off-printed.1 10 T h e introduction insisted that 'it is the workers alone who can describe with thorough knowledge the evils that they suffer, it is they alone - and not some providential saviours - who can energetically apply remedies to the social miseries that they undergo'.1 1 1

Marx conceived the enterprise as primarily educative in the sense of inculcating a class consciousness, though there is no evidence of its having achieved any result. He doubted whether the new party could long remain united and this time he was quite justified: at the Congress of St-Etienne in September 1882 the party split into reformist and revolutionary wings

the latter led by Guesde, who found himself under attack on the grounds that he received orders from the 'Prussian' Marx in London.1 1 2 In reality, the relationship between Marx and Guesde was a very tenuous one, and Marx's opinion of some of his would-be disciples in France was so low that he declared to Lafargue: 'what is certain is that I am no Marxist'.1 1 5 Both his sons-in-law in fact disappointed him by their lack of political sense. He contemptuously dismissed 'Longuet as the last Proudhonist and l.afargue as the last Bakuninist! Devil take them!'1 1 4

Britain was still the country where Marx's ideas made the least impact. I'.ven the United States gave him more encouragement. He closely followed America's 'chronic crisis' of 1 8 7 3 - 78 and was particularly interested in the economic progress of the newest states such as California. He considered that there was a good possibility of 'establishing a serious workers' party'1 1 5 and thought that the government policies of land appropriation would ally the Negroes and farmers with the working class. Even