Peking. Marx’s early writings were the great find of those days.58 The writings differed sharply from Capital in their immediate concern, their design and their language of exposition. More importantly, they legitimated the concern of many marxists in the post-Stalin era, with individuals facing systems of social control and repression, non-socialist as well as socialist. The discussion of the material and social determinations of human alienation offered a major and still potent analytical tool to extricate some major issues of human emancipation. That is how an unfinished and obscurely written Germanic text became an inspiration to the 1968 generation of radicals in Western and Eastern Europe.
On the face of it, the discovery of early Marx has simply meant accepting that his views developed and transformed. Amazingly, it was that very evidence of the unmistakable heterogeneity of his writings which gave yet another twist to Marx’s deification. An ‘epistemological rupture’ was decreed in Paris, dividing between Marx of 1844 (young and part-Hegelian) and marxism, i.e. true thought of Marx (mature and pure) – a totally new rigorous and final Science of Men.59 Marx was infallible after all; his infallibility simply began at a later age. The vision of ‘epistemological rupture’, i.e. Marx’s leap into simultaneous maturity, scientificity and sanctity has been also used to disconnect his analysis from his goals and beliefs. ‘Humanism’ was declared a bourgeois concept, nothing to do with mature, i.e. scientific Marx and a survival at best of the pre-scientific thought alongside of the science.60 ‘Mature Marx’ was not only absolute in truth but a-moral.
The task in the eyes of the proponents of this Science of Men was the further elaboration of and deduction from the objective and eternal Laws, uncovered in Marx’s ‘mature’ writings. To succeed in that application one had simply to keep oneself pure and apart from the septic impact of ‘bourgeois science’, i.e. anything else. That is where, behind the philosophical debates about relationships between Hegel’s and Marx’s thought, an old and ugly face seemed to emerge. For, consequently, there could be only two truly credible explanations of failure of prediction based on absolute wisdom: (a) the misreading of what is already in the Scriptures – caused by surrender to the poison of bourgeois scholarship (that is, of course, pseudo-scholarship); and (b) wilful treason in the service of the enemies of the people. We know what were the ways of rectification for each of those. We should also know by now how immense and self-destructive the cost of it is in terms of socialist thought, deed, and blood.
Another, more sophisticated way ‘to keep Marx in line’ was to salvage his unilinearism by temporarily giving up his infallibility. An interesting and very erudite book by Nikoforov has done just that.61 The author has convincingly argued out of court the attempts of his colleagues in the USSR to de-emphasise the significance of Oriental Despotism in Marx’s writings. He then proceeds to demolish the concept – Marx and Engels were simply wrong on the matter. Marx’s studies of prehistory and of the Russian peasant and Indian peasant communes make him see by 1879 some difficulties with that idea, but he still did not ‘overcome it’. Then a most dramatic conclusion strikes one dumb. Under the impact of Morgan, in the last moments of his life Marx finally ‘overcomes it’, rejecting Oriental Despotism (and the mistaken theories of state attached to it) to return to unilinearism, i.e. to the belief in the ‘Highway of History’ (Magisralnaya Doroga), which all societies are bound to tread. Marx’s date of divine incarnation, i.e. when he has eventually got things right and final, is 1881.62 The proof of this lies, once again, not in Marx but in a review of Engels’s later writings and especially of The Origins.… etc. As a secondary proof comes the fact that in Marx’s drafts of ‘Letter to Zasulich’ and in his conspectus of Morgan’s book the term ‘Oriental Despotism’ did not appear. A comment by Marx related to a study of India (in the same notebook which contain the notes on Morgan), ‘this ass Phear calls the organisation of the rural commune feudal’, is reproduced but dismissed as inconclusive. The fact that Marx actually speaks of ‘central despotism (‘centralised’ in further texts) in the drafts of 1881 is not even noticed.63 There is nothing else – an outstandingly thin evidence for the size of the claim made. The happy end of Marx’s return to the unilinear fold reminds one of the well-known eighteenth-century tale about Voltaire on his death bed returning to the bosom of the Catholic Church, the clergy at his bedside bearing faithful evidence to it. Engels’s views are, of course, quite another matter.
It is time to recapitulate briefly. The last decade of Marx’s life was a distinctive period of his analytical endeavour: a fact recognised, if for different reasons, by a steadily growing number of scholars. Central to it was his involvement with Russian society, both as a source of fundamental data and as a vehicle of analysis and exposition of the problems of a specific type of society which differed structurally from the ‘classical case of capitalism’ on which Capital, Volume 1, was based. Already in the Grundrisse (1857-8) Marx had assumed the multiplicity of roads of social development in pre-capitalist societies. Hobsbawm’s non-consecutive interpretation of it as ‘three or four alternative routes out of primitive communal systems’, each commencing in a different area, i.e. as ‘analytical, though not chronological, stages in … evolution’, is important here.64 If accepted, it is already much more sophisticated and realistic than any simple evolutionist model would have it. Marx shifted his position further as from the 1873-4 period of extensive contacts with Russian scholars, revolutionaries and writings, but more clearly and consciously so since 1877. Marx had come now to accept the multiplicity of roads also within a world in which capitalism existed and became a dominant force. It meant (a) an anticipation of future societal histories as necessarily uneven, interdependent and multilinear in the ‘structural’ sense; (b) the consequent inadequacy of the unilinear ‘progressive’ model for historical analysis as well as for political judgments concerning the best way the socialist cause can be promoted; (c) first steps toward the consideration of the specificity of societies which we call today ‘developing societies’; and, within that context, (d) a re-evaluation of the place of peasantry and its social organisation in the revolutionary processes to come; (e) a preliminary step to look anew at the ruling-class coalition and the role of the state in the ‘developing societies’; and (f) a new significance given the decentralisation of socio-political power within the post-revolutionary society in which the rejuvenation of ‘archaic’ communes may play an important role.
Remarkably for a man who died in 1883, the Marx of those days was beginning to recognise for what they really are the nature, problems and debate concerning ‘developing’ and post-revolutionary societies of the twentieth century. The expression ‘neo-marxist’, often used for those who stepped on from Capital, Volume 1 in their interpretations concerning ‘developing societies’, is clearly misconceived. Most of the so-called neo-marxism, often treated as original or scandalous, is Marx’s marxism. To understand the scope of this achievement one would have to review the three generations of conceptual blindness of the adversaries of Marx within the various ‘modernisation’ schools, as well as Marx’s official descendants. The ground is by now littered with self-fulfilling prophecies masquerading as historical necessities and as laws of social sciences, especially so in so far as the countryside is concerned. Yet, it was Marx who laid the foundations for the global analysis of ‘unevenness’ of ‘development’, for the socialist treatment of peasantry not only as the object or the fodder of history, for the consideration of socialism which is more than proletarian, and so on. Indeed, Marx’s approach to the Russian peasantry, whom he never saw, proved on balance more realistic than that of the Russian marxists in 1920 – witness the New Economic Policy. Without idealising the ‘muzhik’, Marx showed better wisdom even concerning optimal parameters of collectivisation — consider contemporary Hungary. One can proceed with examples.
How does the last stage of Marx’s thought fit into the general sequences of his work? To assume the very existence of that stage is to accept at least three major steps in Marx’s conceptual development: early Marx of the 1840s, a middle Marx of the 1850s and 1860s (the expression ‘mature’ smuggles in the metaphor of ‘a peak’, to be necessarily followed by decline) and the late Marx of the 1870s and 1880s. Uncompleted as the last stage was left by his death in 1883, it was rich in content, laying foundations for
