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 now defined by Marx as the condition for successful collectivisation of the Russian peasant agriculture. Also, it would be gradual change … ‘[in which] the first step would be to place the commune under normal conditions [i.e. in a non-exploitive context] on its present basis.’
In conclusion, to Marx, a timely revolutionary victory could turn the Russian commune into a major ‘vehicle of social regeneration’. A ‘direct starting point of the system to which the contemporary society strives’ and a grass root framework for ‘large-scale co-operative labour’ and the use of ‘modern machinery’. Moreover, that may make some chiefly peasant countries ‘supreme in that sense to the societies where capitalism rules’. That is, indeed, why ‘the Western precedent would prove here nothing at all.’ Morevoer, ‘the issue is not that of a problem to be solved but simply of an enemy, who had to be beaten … to save the Russian commune one needs a Russian revolution.’ Note the expression Russian revolution, twice repeated within the text. Finally, to understand it all ‘one must descend from pure theory to Russian reality’ and not be frightened by the word ‘archaic’, for ‘the new system to which the modern society is tending will be a revival in a superior form of an archaic social type.’
The issue of the peasant commune was used by Marx also as a major way to approach a set of fundamental problems, new to his generation, but which would be nowadays easily recognised as those of ‘developing societies’, be it ‘modernisation’, ‘dependency’ or the ‘combined and uneven’ spread of global capitalism and its specifically ‘peripheral’ expression. There were several such components of Marx’s new itinerary of topics for study and preliminary conclusions, none of which worked out in full. At the centre lies the newly perceived notion of ‘uneven development’, interpreted not quantitatively (i.e. that ‘some societies move faster than others’) but as global interdependence of societal transformations. The ‘Chronological Notes’, i.e. a massive conspectus of Marx written in 1880-2, is directly relevant here. As rightly noticed in an interesting contribution of B. Porshnev (who refers it to the ‘last 9-12 years period of Marx’s life’), it shows Marx’s attention turning to ‘the problem of historical interdependence of people and countries in the different period of global history, i.e. the synchronic unity of history’ (and one should add to dichronic inter-societal unity).30 Marx comes now to assume also for the future a multiplicity of roads of social transformation, within the global framework of mutual and differential impact. (Already in the Grundrisse he had accepted it manifestly for the pre-capitalist past.) That is indeed why the generalised application of the discussion of ‘primitive accumulation’ in Volume I of Capital is by 1877 so explicitly rejected. As is documented and argued by Wada, it meant also that Marx had begun to ‘perceive the structure unique to backward capitalism’31 – to say ‘structures’ would probably be to say it better. The idea of ‘dependent development’ is not yet there, but its foundation is laid. To sum it up bluntly, to Marx, the England he knew ‘that is more developed industrially’ did not and indeed could not any longer ‘show to the less developed’ Russia the ‘image of its own future’. By one of history’s ironies, a century later we are still trying to shed the opposite claim of post-1917 Russia’s monopoly over revolutionary imagination, the assumption that it is Russia which is to show to all of the Englands of our time the image of their socialist futures.
Marx’s new turn of mind was unmistakably recognised and acknowledged after their fashion by doctrinaire marxists. The ‘Letter to the Editorial Board of Otechestvennye Zapiski’ was left unpublished by the Emancipation of Labour group, despite promises to Engels who let them have it for publication. The ‘Letter to Zasulich’, written by explicit request to make Marx’s views known, was not published by them either. (The first of these was initially published in 1887 by the Messenger of People’s Will, the second only in 1924). Much psychologistic rubbish was written in Russia and in the West about how and why those writings were forgotten by Plekhanov, Zasulich, Axelrod etc. and about the ‘need for specialised psychologists to have it explained’.32 It was probably simpler and cruder. Already in Marx’s own generation there were marxists who knew better than Marx what marxism is and were prepared to censor him on the sly, for his own sake.
The clearest salute to Marx’s originality and to his new views was given a generation later by the most erudite of the Russian marxists of his time, Ryazanov, the first director of the Marx-Engels Institute in Moscow who published first in 1924 the four drafts of the ‘Letter to Zasulich’ (discovered by him in 1911). To him, the four drafts written during less than two weeks of intensive intellectual and political considerations indicated the decline of Marx’s capacities.33 On top of that hint he has added, quoting Edward Bernstein, an additional explanation for Marx’s populist deviation: ‘Marx and Engels have restricted the expression of their scepticism not to discourage too much the Russian revolutionaries.’34 Poor old Marx was clearly going senile at 63 or else engaging in little lies of civility and expedience, once he departed from the ‘straight and narrow’ of the marxism of his epigones. (An amusing affinity – during and after the 1905-7 Revolution, Lenin was accused of leaning toward populism by some of his marxist adversaries and associates.35 It seems that those two have had a ‘deviation’ in common.)
Radical backwardness and conservative revolutionaries
Three more related issues should be singled out for attention: the nature of the Russian experience, Marx’s attitude to revolutionary movements and the place of Engels as Marx’s most significant interpreter. Firstly, while the experience of India or China was to Marx’s generation of Europeans remote, abstract and often misconceived, Russia was closer not only geographically but in the basic sense of human contact, possible knowledge of language and of availability of evidence and analysis, self-generated by the natives. It was not only the difference in extent of information which was at issue, however. The Russia of those times was marked by political independence and growing international weakness, placed on the peripheries of capitalist development, massively peasant yet with rapidly expanding industry (owned mainly by foreigners and the crown) and with a highly interventionist state. In the conceptual language of our own generation Russia was, or was rapidly turning into, a ‘developing society’ – a new type of social phenomenon. Newcomers are hard to recognise but Marx’s conceptual ‘feel in the fingers’ was too good to miss entirely this first silhouette of a new shape. It had been no accident that it was from
