Marx and Marxism (Pelican) by Gregory Claeys

Author:Gregory Claeys [Claeys, Gregory]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9780141983493
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2018-04-05T04:00:00+00:00

As Marx is the leading social thinker of modern times, so the definitive event of the Marxian epoch was the greatest experiment in social engineering ever attempted to this time: the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. So it must be considered here in proportion to its importance.1

In the 1870s Marxism began spreading in Russia, where Capital was first translated (in 1872; it appeared in English in 1887). Most Russian readers, however, thought Marx’s framework irrelevant because capitalism was so little developed. Giving priority to economic factors over juridical or political ones in any historical analysis was applicable anywhere, though. This viewpoint was shared with Bakunin, and attracted the attention of numerous intellectuals. Many of these affiliated themselves with the largely middle-class populist or Narodnik movement, which began to arise in the 1860s and 1870s and which concentrated on protecting peasant communes, a view for which we have seen Marx had some sympathy. Some of these, especially the Narodnaya Volya (People’s Will) group, formed in 1879, turned to terrorism.

Marxism’s appeal in Russia also lay in its scientific, enlightened outlook. Western European ideas and technology were looked upon, as American ones would be a century later, as vastly superior to anything Russian. They epitomized modernity, as the revolution of 1917 would in turn. The leading Russian Marxist at home, and later in exile, was Georgi Plekhanov (1856–1918).2 From a noble family whose father had possessed some fifty serfs, he was a striking figure and brilliant speaker. Plekhanov founded the Russian Social Democratic Party in Minsk in 1898 with just nine members, including Iurii (or Julius) Martov, later a leading Menshevik critic of Chekist excesses and an advocate of democracy. Plekhanov was evidently the first Russian to use the phrase ‘dialectical materialism’, in an 1891 essay. Amongst his many works, On the Monist Conception of History (1895) helped to ‘educate a whole generation of Russian Marxists’, Lenin recalled.3 Here Marx’s thought was seen as the culmination of Enlightenment materialism, Hegelianism and socialism. Drawing largely on Engels, Plekhanov described how dialectical materialism could overcome mere fatalistic submission to the iron laws of historical necessity. If for Hegel progress was the consciousness of freedom, for Marx it was recognizing necessity as the basis of freedom. This entailed mastering economic laws, which socialism promised.

In the late 1890s and early twentieth century the so-called Legal Marxists, including Peter Struve, M. Tugan-Baranovsky, Nikolai Berdyaev and Sergei Bulgakov, engaged with these issues. Viewing capitalism’s development in Russia as progressive, they opposed populist arguments that peasant communes were a sufficient basis for a socialist future, and touted ‘intellectual Europeanization’ (in Bulgakov’s phrase) as Russia’s sole salvation. This implied, as The Communist Manifesto had urged, a revolutionary partnership with the bourgeoisie in order to overthrow Tsarism. Many members of this group wished to maintain a moral outlook that was independent of class struggle, and a concept of free will. By 1900 Lenin was criticizing their perspective as bourgeois and ‘Bernsteinian’ revisionist, while still seeing them as allies in the struggle against autocracy.

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