by P. Miliukov, K. Kocharovskii, etc., as well as by G. Plekhanov and I. Chernyshev in the marxist camp. This view was often referred to as the ‘state school’. It was opposed by an equally impressive list of scholars and political theorists of whom N. Chernyshevskii and I. Belyaev were paramount to Marx’s own generation. Marx himself spoke up sharply against Chicherin (Marks i Engels, op. cit., vol. 33, p. 482). For a good historiography of the debate see Aleksandrov, op. cit., pp. 3-46.
26. Marx wrote the passage in ‘The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte’ (1852) referring to France but deleted it in the reprint of 1869. The dates are significant for reasons discussed in our text.
27. Marx and Engels, Sochineniya, op. cit., vol. 32, p. 158. Relatedly in time, Marx has attacked Herzen’s view in 1867 and spoke in absolute terms of the French peasantry’s conservatism (e.g. in the 1871 notes on the Paris Commune, ibid., vol. 17, pp. 554-7).
28. Marx, Pre-Capitalist Economic Formations, op. cit., p. 68.
29. For full text, see Part Two.
30. Marks-Istorik, op. cit., p. 431.
31. See below, p. 631.
32. See below, p. 129. How much all that still ‘aches’ can be best exemplified by a short aside from P. Konyushaya, Karl Marx i revolyutsionnaya rossiya, Moscow, 1975, where after a stream of invectives against the multiplicity of ‘falsifiers of Marx’, i.e. everybody who discussed him outside Russia, tells us that Plekhanov ‘based his argument on the position formulated by Marx in his letter to “Otechestvennye Zapiski” ’ (p. 357). She forgets to inform us when, where and how.
33. David Ryazanov, see below, Part Two. For contemporary Western equivalents of that view see Marx and Engels, The Russian Menace to Europe, op. cit., p. 266, and on the left, J. Elster in K. Marx, Verker i Utlag, Oslo, 1970, p. 46.
34. See below p. 130.
35. Plekhanov’s speech at the Fourth Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Workers’ Party in 1906 stated it explicitly. On the other hand, the year 1905 has seen also the appeals of the Saratov Bolsheviks and of Nikodim (A. Shestakov, the chief of the agrarian section of the Bolsheviks Moscow committee) against Lenin’s new agrarian programme, treated by them as ‘capitulation’ to the populist petty bourgeoisie.
36. Letters of 2 and 30 November 1876, Rubel and Monale, op. cit., pp. 229-31.
37. Ibid., p. 254. For further discussion, see the paper by K. Mohri in Monthly Review, 1979, vol. 30, no. 11.
38. From the 1847 speech about the independence of Poland, Marx and Engels, Sochineniya, op. cit., vol. 4, p. 273.
39. Ibid., vol. 19, p. 28.
40. The quotation comes from Marx’s letter of 21 March 1881 to his daughter, ibid., vol. 35, pp. 145-8.
41. For Marx’s sharply critical view about the ‘boring doctrines’ of the Black Repartition, see his letter to Sorge of 5 October 1880, ibid., vol. 34, p. 380. The way Marx (and in the 1880s, Engels) related their attitude to People’s Will to their other contacts is interesting. The very letter of Marx, which spoke admiringly of the human qualities of the members of People’s Will (11 April 1881) described Kautsky as ‘mediocre, not a very able man, self-assured, the “know all” type … admittedly hard working, he spends much time on statistics without getting far with it, naturally belonging to the tribe of “philisters”, while, on the other hand, no doubt, a decent fellow.’ On 23 April 1885, Engels replied to Vera Zasulich’s request to express his views about Plekhanov’s book declaring his marxist creed against the Russian populists (Nashi raznoglasiya) refusing to pass judgment: ‘My friends of People’s Will, did not tell me of those matters’, and then proceeded to defend the People’s Will belief in the chances of an immediate Russian revolution.
42. W. Weitraub, ‘Marx and Russian revolutionaries’, Cambridge Journal, 1949, vol. 3, p. 501.
43. The third Thesis of Feuerbach, Marx and Engels, Selected Works, vol. 1, p. 13.
44. Marx, Pre-Capitalist Economic Formations, op. cit. (Introduction), p. 53. For an interesting discussion of the philosophical differences between Marx and his immediate interpreters, Engels, Kautsky, Plekhanov and Bernstein, etc., see L. Colletti, Introduction to K. Marx, Early Writings, Harmondsworth, 1975, pp. 7-14. See also L. Kolakowsky, Main Currents of Marxism, Oxford, 1981, vol. 1.
45. Marks i Engels, op. cit., p. 272 (the quotation adopted from Maurer). For Engels’s views see his paper ‘Marka’, written in 1882, Marx and Engels, Sochineniya, op. cit., vol. 19, pp. 335-7.
46. See below, p. 108.
47. Ibid., p. 334 (subquotation from Morgan).
48. F. Engels, Anti-Duhring, London 1943, p. 203.
49. Marx and Engels, Sochineniya, op. cit., vols. 21-2 (publications) and 36-9 (correspondence). Thanks are due here to Professor M. Mchedlov of the Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute in Moscow for ascertaining that point. He has pointed out that, on the other hand, Engels did not remove that term from the new editions of Anti-Duhring in 1886 and 1894, an important point open, however, to a variety of interpretations. The explanation offered by Hobsbawm (Marx, Pre-Capitalist Economic Formations, op. cit., p. 51) and by some Soviet scholars that the ‘Asiatic Mode’ is simply substituted at that stage by the broader concept of Archaic Formation does not fully meet the case, i.e. does not explain the correlation between the disappearance of the concept of Oriental Despotism from Engels’s work and the date of Marx’s death.
50. Quoted after Marx and Engels, Selected Works, op. cit., vol. 2, p. 388. For biographical details, see below, p. 177.
51. Ibid., pp. 387-8, 390, 395.
52. Ibid., pp. 403-4.
53. Ibid., pp. 395-412.
54. In the 1890s Plekhanov moved to a sharply ‘anti-peasant’ position, as part of his growing polemic against the populists. Relentless pressure, mixing flattery and cajolery, was applied by him to enlist Engels’s authority in squabbles within the Russian left, for which see Perepiska, Marksa i Engel’sa, Moscow, 1951, pp. 324-46. Engels had on the whole explicitly rejected those pressures, and had shown for a time considerable suspicion of Plekhanov (Walicki, op. cit., pp. 181-3) but was, no doubt, influenced nevertheless, the more so as his Russian was ‘rusty’ by the late 1880s and by his own admission he had stopped reading any sources in that language.
55. Engels’s 1892 letter to Danielson in Perepiska, op. cit., p. 126.
56. Marx and Engels, Selected Works, op. cit., vol. 3, pp. 460 and 469.
57. See, for discussion, Marx, Pre-Capitalist Economic Formations, op. cit. (Introduction), pp. 60-2.
58. Karl Marx, Early Writings, London, 1963.
59. L. Althusser and E. Balibar, Reading Capital, London, 1975. For a British version of the same see B. Hindess and P. Hirst, Pre-capitalist Modes of Production, London, 1975. The next step came when Althusser had discovered Hegelian traces in Capital itself and
