Karl Marx

by Shlomo Avineri

  Despite all this, his comments on the Gotha program include an important section in which he discusses how a future socialist society would look—a theme he usually avoided assiduously, always arguing that this way lies the temptation for utopian grandstanding. Yet when confronted in the Gotha program with the assertion that once the means of production would be nationalized, the worker will receive the full value of his labor, Marx views this as simplistic and wrong-headed. He then offers perhaps one of his most sophisticated statements of the complex developmental stages of socialist transformation. Unsurprisingly, this brings back insights Marx had already expressed in EPM of 1844 as well as in The Communist Manifesto.

  The point Marx is making is not only about stages of development but also about the immanent dialectic of the change. To Marx, for all of its revolutionary nature, the transition from capitalism to socialism will be an outcome of internal changes within capitalist society itself, and not the outcome of a socialist procrustean bed imposed from outside. Hence in its first stage it will still be based on wage labor.

  What we have to deal with here is a communist society not as it has developed on its own foundations, but on the contrary, just as it emerges from capitalist society, which is thus in every respect, economically, morally, and intellectually, still stamped with the birth marks of the old society from whose womb it emerges. … Hence equal right here is still in principle bourgeois right. … One man is superior to another physically or mentally. … This equal right is an unequal right for unequal labor. It recognizes no class differences, because everyone is only a worker like everyone else; but it tacitly recognizes unequal individual endowments. … But these defects are inevitable in the first phase of communist society.

  So nationalization of the means of production will not by itself provide the abolition of the position of the worker and his relation to his work. This will happen only in the second stage of transformation—and here Marx’s language echoes also the soaring rhetoric of his early writings.

  In a higher phase of communist society, after the enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labor, and therewith also the antithesis between mental and physical labor, have vanished; after labor has become not only a means of life but life’s primary need; after the productive forces have also increased with the all-round development of the individual, and all the fountains of co-operative wealth flow more abundantly—only then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be crossed in its entirety and society inscribe on its banners: “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.”

  Just as the text of the Gotha program itself can be easily relegated to oblivion, much of Marx’s Critique of the Gotha Program could equally accompany it to the same memory hole. But this passage remains one of his most inspiring—and memorable—occasions where he allowed himself a glimpse, vague as it may be, into the realm of the future. With good reason, this remains one of the most quoted passages ever written by Marx—not only as a critic but also as a visionary.

  AN INCONGRUOUS ENCOUNTER: MARX AND GRAETZ

  Marx’s health did not improve over the years, and he continued to suffer from various intestinal maladies as well as boils and constant insomnia. His financial worries were never over, but he could now afford spells at various spas, both in England and later also on the Continent. During 1874–76 he took the waters every summer in Carlsbad in Bohemia, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, accompanied by Eleanor. It so happened that among the people he met there was the German Jewish historian Heinrich Graetz, the founder of modern Jewish historiography and the author of the influential multivolume History of the Jewish People. After they met there for the first time, Eleanor contacted Graetz to coordinate their visits to Carlsbad the following year so they would be there at the same time.

  We do not have any records of what the two talked about, and there is no surviving substantive correspondence except short notes about prospective dates at Carlsbad. There is an indirect hint that they discussed the political situation in Russia, but one can imagine this was not their only subject of common interest. It would be fascinating to know what these two elderly intellectuals and scholars did talk about—one an ordained Orthodox rabbi who also trained in Leopold von Ranke’s school of German historiography, the doyen of modern Jewish historians, and the other by that time the symbol of socialist thought. It is obvious from the very fact that they coordinated their visits to Carlsbad that they found each other’s company interesting. Did they question where history in Europe was leading? Did they discuss the possibilities of radical change and revolution? The future of nationalism? German unification? The role of Jews in history? The future of the Jews? Did the ghost of Hegel accompany them to the Kurhaus (spa house)? Did Marx confide to Graetz the details of his family’s history and the circumstances of his father’s conversion? Coming from such diverse backgrounds, and with such totally different biographies, these two sages represented two very different trajectories of Jewish lives in Germany—and in Europe generally—under the complex conditions of emancipation and acculturation; what divided them they also had in common.

  We do not know. Yet the Marx-Graetz encounter still awaits the creative talents of a gifted novelist—or playwright—to imagine what the two were talking about when walking side by side from one spring of mineral water to another and sharing their ideas about history, past, present, and possibly future. Such a novel or play could succeed because it would not be concocted out of thin air: hours of insights into philosophy, religion, history did take place: they could be reimagined. Few nineteenth-century intellectual encounters could be more fascinating. Although he was not a Zionist, Graetz’s view of the Jews, not as a mere religious community but as a people with a distinct national history, helped prepare the theoretical grid that led to the foundation of Israel, and Marx’s thought—for all of its complexity—did pave the way to the Soviet revolution. A more dramatic prefiguration of the encounter between Zion and Kremlin could not be imagined.

  Ironically, and yet as could be expected, Austrian imperial police agents did watch Marx during his Carlsbad visits. On 1st September 1875, the local police authorities reported to headquarters that “Charles Marx, Doctor of Philosophy of London, outstanding leader of the Democratic-Social Democratic Party [sic] is again taking the cure” in town. Respectfully the agent reports that, just like during his visit the previous year, “so far Marx has conducted himself quietly and had no great contact with other persons taking the cure and frequently goes for long walks alone.” The surveillance obviously missed the walks with Graetz—or the agents did not find they deserved their attention.

  9

  Toward the Sunset

  ON RUSSIA: AGAINST HISTORICAL INEVITABILITY

  IT MAY NOT BE SURPRISING that in the last decade of his life, Marx devoted considerable time and effort to Russia. There were two aspects to this: on the one hand, his constant concern about the negative impact Czarist Russia might have on possible progress in the West toward socialism; on the other, the emergence of an active revolutionary movement in Russia itself posed a number of theoretical and practical challenges to Marx’s own theories of historical development and revolutionary potentialities. Having basically concluded that western capitalist societies were moving toward transformation through their internal developments that would lead to proletarian hegemony and socialism, turning his attention to Russia was a natural corollary. In his didactic and scholarly method, Marx read voluminously about Russian history and society, and even started learning Russian.

  We have seen how since 1849 Marx was worried that an authoritarian and reactionary Russia might again intervene against revolutionary waves in western Europe, as it had done during the Napoleonic Wars and then again in 1848–49. These fears led him to publish a number of articles criticizing, among others, the pro-Russian politics of William Gladstone. In 1877–78, especially after the outbreak of the Russo-Turkish War, he repeated these arguments in a number of articl
es, both signed and anonymous, taking Gladstone’s Liberal Party to task for encouraging the most reactionary regime in Europe and thus overlooking its impact on general European politics. These issues might also have appeared in his conversations with Heinrich Graetz during their visits to Carlsbad. For Graetz the fate of Russia, at that time the home of the largest Jewish population in the world, would obviously be a matter of major concern.

  But in the late 1870s and early 1880s political developments in Russia gave rise to a new set of issues. The liberal reforms of Czar Alexander II, whose edict emancipating the serfs in 1861 had totally transformed Russian society, greatly facilitated the emergence of a revolutionary socialist movement in the country. Bakunin’s translation of Das Kapital into Russian as well as Marx’s activity in the IWA, and his international visibility during the Paris Commune, made his name familiar among the Russian revolutionary intelligentsia, many of them students and émigrés in the West. Hence there were numerous references to Marx’s writings in the internal debates among Russian radicals about Russia’s future developments. In some cases, Russian activists contacted Marx, looking up to him as a master, in typical Russian fashion, which occasionally rubbed him the wrong way, though he was of course flattered by the attention.

  One of Marx’s most detailed responses to this debate is a lengthy letter—in fact a short essay, in French—that he wrote to the St. Petersburg literary journal Otechestvennye Zapiski in November 1877. In it, he referred to a debate among several Russian intellectuals questioning whether the developments in the West described in Das Kapital would have to be repeated in Russia: Would it need to industrialize first and develop a full-blown capitalist society before a future socialist transformation could take place, or could Russia move straight from its pre-capitalist state to a socialist transformation?

  Marx took strong exception to the deterministic view that what did happen in the West would have to be replicated in Russia. Acknowledging that Russia had taken some steps in this direction, he was agnostic about whether there was any preordained historical necessity that Russia needed to follow the western path. The only conclusion that could be drawn from Das Kapital, he argued, was that “if Russia is going to become a capitalist nation after the example of the West European countries … she will not succeed without first transforming a large part of her peasantry into proletarians … and once taken into the bosom of the capitalist regime, she will experience its pitiless laws like other profane peoples. That is all.”

  However, he went on to point out that other paths besides capitalist development were open, bringing up the example of late Roman developments, where the Roman proletariat “became not wage earners but a mob of do-nothings, more abject than the ‘poor whites’ in the American South.”

  And then Marx referred to an issue that appeared central to Russian revolutionary discourse: Could the historical Russian village commune (the obshchina) become the foundation for a new social order in Russia? Among the books on Russia that Marx had read with great interest was a study from the 1830s by the Prussian official August von Haxthausen on the survival of the Russian village communes, and on several occasions he wondered whether they were still as strong as that work had suggested. He mentioned some of the authors who had referred to his own writings and asked whether, when discussing the village communes, they have “found them in Russia, or just in the books of Haxthausen.” He further chided these critics, including one in particular, Nikolai Mikhailovsky, for reading too much into Das Kapital.

  My critic feels he absolutely must metamorphose my historical sketch of the genesis of capitalism in Western Europe into a historical-philosophical theory of the general path every people is fated to tread, whatever the historical circumstances in which it finds itself. … But I beg to differ: he is both honoring and shaming me.

  Referring to the different path developments in Rome took, Marx reiterated his insistence on close, comparative historical studies, avoiding recourse to grand historical-philosophical systems.

  Thus events strikingly analogous but taking place in different historical circumstances led to totally different results. By studying each of these forms of evolution separately and then comparing them, one can easily find the clue to this phenomenon, but one will never arrive there by using as one’s master-key a general historical-philosophical theory, the supreme virtue of which consists in being super-historical.

  This is obviously not only about Russia: it is perhaps Marx’s strongest argument about the historicity of his economic analysis, and reflects the same need for pragmatic, comparative studies implied in his differentiated assessment of the modes of socialist transformation expressed in his 1872 Amsterdam speech. Contrary to what later followers claimed, Marx did not have an overall theory of undifferentiated linear universal historical development. In the case of Russia, his argument is clear: if Russia develops along capitalist lines, the consequences would be analogous to what had happened in the West. But it was not predetermined that Russia would have to follow the capitalist path—other options were also available and possible.

  This pragmatic and open-ended approach, which caused some dismay among Marx’s Russian followers—who were looking for ironclad, almost divinely ordained, laws of history—appears again and again in Marx’s correspondence with Russian socialists.

  The assassination of Alexander II in March 1881 and the resulting brutal repressive countermeasures of the Czarist government threw Russian society—and the various Russian revolutionary groups—into turmoil. These developments also deepened the schism between the Narodnik (“Populist”) groups among the revolutionaries, who looked to the peasantry and its communal village traditions, and the so-called “Westernizers,” some of whom adopted many of Marx’s thoughts. These debates are reflected in repeated questions to Marx by Russian revolutionary activists, and his exchange with Vera Zasulich is perhaps the most interesting. Zasulich was initially a follower of Bakunin, but after spending some time in jail and then reaching the West, she distanced herself from the anarchists and their terrorist tactics. She became one of the founders of the Russian Emancipation of Labor group, and later with George Plekhanov was one of the founders of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party.

  After finding refuge in Switzerland, she addressed Marx on his views about the future of the Russian revolutionary movement, focusing on whether the village communes could become the basis for a future Russian socialist society, thus obviating the western-type path leading through industrialization and the emergence of an industrial proletariat. In other words, could socialism in Russia be based on the peasantry rather than the industrial proletariat, which did not yet exist there in any significant numbers?

  Three drafts of Marx’s answer have been preserved, as well as the response he eventually sent. His hesitation testifies to his exasperation at being put, by people who viewed themselves as his followers, in the position of having to give doctrinal answers ex cathedra to complex and controversial questions. At the same time, it is clear that Marx was himself far from being able to make up his mind: he obviously felt far less comfortable judging Russian conditions, which were then quickly changing, compared with his relative certainties about western European developments.

  His letter of 9th March 1881 is far shorter and more peremptory than his initial drafts. It is clear that he would have preferred not to issue a quasi-papal decree. Written in French, the letter’s profuse yet distancing courtesy (“Chère Citoyenne”) masks some of his unease, as does the wordy excuse for the tardiness of his answer. He then quotes three passages from Das Kapital, chapter 32, in which he described the development of industrialization in the West, pointing out that all countries in the West followed the same path, yet one should not generalize from this development, as “the ‘historical inevitability’ of this movement is expressly Western European.” If Russia were to follow the West, this would paradoxically mean that common property (that is, the obshchina) would have to be transformed into private property�
��very different from what did happen in the West, where industrialization virtually abolished peasant private holdings.

  Yet he still hedges. The question is not a theoretical one, but depends on whether the village commune is in reality strong enough to become the foundation of the new social order.

  The analysis drawn from Das Kapital suggests no reasons for or against the vitality of the rural commune; but the social research I conducted … has convinced me that this community is the mainspring of Russian social recreation. But in order that it might function as such one would first have to eliminate the deleterious influences which assail it from every quarter and then to ensure the conditions normal for spontaneous development.

  This almost delphic pronouncement also reappears in a slightly different form in the ambiguous language Marx and Engels used in January 1882, after the assassination of Alexander II and the ensuing turmoil, in their preface to a new edition of the Russian translation of The Communist Manifesto. The first Russian translation of the Manifesto was prepared by Bakunin and published in Geneva in the 1860s, in the journal Kolokol edited by Alexander Herzen. It had naturally a limited circulation, and after the 1881 events in Russia, Marx and Engels decided, in response to requests from Russian colleagues, and in order to counter Bakunin’s anarchist views, to prepare a new edition. In the preface they pointed out, somewhat apologetically, that when the Manifesto was drafted in late 1847, Russia was not mentioned, as at that time it “constituted the last great reserve of all European reaction,” and in the revolutions of 1848, European princes as well as the bourgeoisie found in Russia “their only salvation.” Now, it was claimed, “Russia forms the vanguard of revolutionary action in Europe.”