had overstated, to be sure, the extra-class, inertia-bound, ‘autonomous’ dimensions of tsardom – to him it was a ‘state suspended in the air, so to speak, one that has nothing in common with the existing social order and that has its roots in the past’.50 Yet as Engels was fond of saying, ‘the proof of the pudding’ of political theorising is ‘in the eating of it’. On the point of political prediction and strategy, Tkachev had concluded, in line with Chernyshevskii’s views, that Russia might benefit from the ‘relative advantages of backwardness’ and thereby more easily produce ‘social revolution’ than Western Europe. Also in his view, that potential could be lost if not taken up in time. He had suggested, impudently for 1874, that there was a chance that Russia might proceed along a revolutionary path towards socialism even earlier than the USA or Great Britain. Such a ‘leap’ through a ‘stage’ would entail the conquest and massive use of centralised state power. Tkachev had also assumed that to carry out the aims of social reconstruction, while facing enemies and a still untrustworthy majority of population, the revolutionaries should/would proceed for a time to rule ‘from above’ – a dictatorship of a revolutionary party. All of the European left was subsequently provided with light relief when in 1875 Engels came to exercise his wit on Tkachev. Such ‘green schoolboy’s views’ by which Russia may do more for socialism than just to facilitate the beginning of the socialist revolution where it must actually begin, i.e. in the West, or even more outrageously, a vision of a socialist regime in muzhik-full Russia, even before industrialised Western Europe would see it, was ‘pure hot-air’ and only proved that it was Tkachev who was ‘suspended in mid-air’ and still had ‘to learn the ABC of Socialism’.51 All very funny, but with an unexpected twist when seen retrospectively, two generations after November 1917 in Russia, and a generation after October 1949 in China.
In so far as the issue of the Russian commune was concerned, Engels loyally defended to the end both the view that it may serve as a unit of socialist transformation and the provision that for that to happen a proletarian revolution in the West must show ‘the retarded countries … by its example how it is done’,52 ‘it’ being the establishment of post-capitalist society. ‘It should be borne in mind,’ he added in 1894, ‘that the far-gone dissolution of Russian communal property has [since 1875] considerably advanced.’53 Plekhanov was by now Engels’s major guide to Russia and the head of the Russian marxist organisation, involved as it was in a violent dispute about peasantry’s future with the (mostly ‘legal’, i.e. reformist) populists of the day.54 The Russian peasant commune was increasingly seen by Engels, accordingly, as on its last legs, with capitalism in overwhelming presence. The only thing left to those who liked it little seemed to be ‘to console ourselves with the idea that all this in the end must serve the cause of human progress’.55 As to the European peasantry, he had even more poignant things to say, in 1894, laying bare the general attitude prevailing in the second International: ‘in brief our small peasant, like every other survival of the past modes of production, is hopelessly doomed … in view of the prejudices arriving out of their entire economic position, the upbringing and isolation … we can win the mass of the small peasants only if we make them a promise which we ourselves know we cannot keep’56 – which was, of course, out of the question.
But Engels was also a revolutionary and so were many of his and Marx’s intellectual heirs. It was their support of revolutionary strategies which was increasingly at odds with the theoretical doctrine. While on the level of theory Marx was being ‘engelsised’ and Engels, still further, ‘kautskised’ and ‘plekhanovised’ into an evolutionist mould, revolutions were spreading by the turn of the century through the backward/’developing’ societies: Russia 1905 and 1917, Turkey 1906, Iran 1909, Mexico 1910, China 1910 and 1927. Peasant insurrection was central to most of them. None of them were ‘bourgeois revolutions’ in the West European sense and some of them proved eventually socialist in leadership and results. At the same time, no socialist revolution came in the West nor did a socialist ‘world revolution’ materialise. In the political life of the socialist movements of the twentieth century there was an urgent need to revise strategies or go under. Lenin, Mao and Ho chose the first. It meant speaking with ‘double-tongues’ – one of strategy and tactics, the other of doctrine and conceptual substitutes, of which the ‘proletarian revolutions’ in China or Vietnam, executed by peasants and ‘cadres’, with no industrial workers involved, are but particularly dramtic examples.
The alternative was theoretical purity and political disaster. Once again using personalities to pinpoint a broader issue, the end of the lives of Plekhanov and Kautsky, the ‘father of Russian marxism’ and the world’s most erudite marxist respectively, provide to it a tragic testimony and a sign. The first died in 1918, an ‘internal exile’ in the midst of revolution – an embittered, bewildered and lonely foe of the experiment he fathered. The second died in 1938, an exile watching incomprehensibly and aghast the double shadow over Europe of Nazism in the industrially progressive and electorally mass-socialist Germany, and of Stalinism in the first-born socialist Russia. The terrible fate of finding oneself ‘on the rubbish heap of history’ had claimed its first generation of marxist theorists.
Reading Marx: gods and craftsmen
Back to Marx: what adds significance to discussion of the last stage in the development of his thought is what it teaches us about his intellectual craftsmanship and about him as a human being. The very fact of transformation in Marx’s thought and not just of its logical unfolding shocks those to whom Marx is god. Was he god or human? As against gods and godlings the test of humanity is that of being context-bound, changeable in views, and fallible. Human vision reflects physical, social and intellectual environments. Human vision changes in time – we learn and discover. Humans err in perception, understanding and prediction. God’s vision is unlimited, unchanging and infallible – it can only unfold what is already in it. It is also amoral, for there is no way to judge god’s ethics – it is his word which is the moral code. That is one reason why the human mind has designed gods as humanity’s anti-model and ever craves for their existence, as the final resort in a painfully unstable world of endless heterogeneity and surprise. Not much was changed on that score by the scientific revolution of our times.
When facing true masters of thought and deed the great temptation is to invest them with godly qualities. Surely, at least they stand above environment, history, mistake and sin, offering their worshippers and interpreters a glimpse of eternity and a link to the Absolute.
To put a case for Marx’s humanity it is probably best to begin with the interpretations of his godliness. While commentary varied, the deification of Marx and of Volume 1 of Capital was deeply rooted in the second International. The 1917 political victory made Bolshevism into the most influential interpretation of marxism in the world. By the 1930s, stalinism had simplified it and brutalised it into a sole tool of ideological control. Stalin was right and therefore Lenin was right and thereby Marx was mostly right (or else …). Political expedience as defined by infallible leadership had merged with final truth and indisputable ethics of obedience. Once the ‘antagonist social classes’ were ‘abolished’ and the Communist Party put in charge, the very fact of economic advance would inevitably produce socialism followed by communism. This fundamental state legitimation has produced powerful ideological demand for unilinearity as the sole mode of explanation – a model of inevitable progress defined by every step of the most progressive regime on earth. Oriental Despotism (or indeed any multilinear model) did not fit those needs. Worst still, it could be and was used to castigate the Soviet regime itself as retrograde. Two ways to iron out these problems were toyed with in the 1920s: (a) to define Oriental Despotism as a universal stage of unilinear development (following ‘primary communism’ and preceding slavery) or else, a sub-stage of the pre-class ‘archaic’ societies; and (b) to omit Oriental Despotism altogether as unsound on scholarly grounds.57 Stalin resolved any such doubts by cutting through them. The concept of Oriental Despotism was abolished by decree, i.e. declared un-marxist with the usual penalties attached.
To the marxists west of the USSR, the 1960s were a period of dramatic change and reassessment
