A World to Win

by Sven-Eric Liedman

  In the rest of the text, Marx goes through the proposed programme line by line, noting embarrassing trivialities, questionable inferences, and fine truths. His tone increases markedly as soon as he sees Lassalle’s surviving thoughts behind the text. He angrily objected to Lassalle’s phrase ‘unverkürzter Arbeitsertrag’ – undiminished proceeds of labour – which he found incompatible with all reasonable economic thinking. In addition, the idea that the worker should receive the full value in wages of what their labour produced is unrealistic. One part of it necessarily had to go to administrative costs, another to schools and healthcare and so on, a third to those who cannot work at all or those who can no longer work.

  Marx also detects the remainder of Lassalle’s and his party’s ideas in the proposal that the working class should ally with the landowners. Only the capitalists were pointed out as opponents.

  The question of how Marx views morals is an interesting one. There is the trace of a declaration in what he says about justice. The programme’s proposal talks about ‘equitable allocation’. But what is equitable allocation under the prevailing method of production? Marx asked himself. Is such allocation not a chimera when certain classes possess economic power over production? It will be otherwise only in a society where class power is broken. But then, justice would not mean that everyone gets the exact same compensation for their labour. Some people are physically or intellectually superior to others, but these natural differences should not single out the less fortunate for discrimination. Some people are married, others are not. Some have more children than others.

  Marx distinguished between a lower and a higher stage under communism. Only in the higher stage are individuals no longer subordinate to the division of labour. The antithesis between physical and intellectual labour is abolished, and individuals are equal to their productive forces. ‘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 abilities, to each according to his needs.’ In short, it is only in such a society that true justice can prevail.

  This is the culmination of the critique – what follows after seems like marginal notes in comparison. Marx notes a slipshod use of the term ‘reactionary mass’. The bourgeoisie was and is a revolutionary class; who would dare cry out to craftsmen, minor industrialists, and farmers that they were a reactionary mass?

  Another criticism deals with the tension between nation and internationalism. Marx says that the class struggle is only national in its form, whereas it is international in its content. That is: its immediate targets of attack are the class relations of its own nation, but the same struggle must take place in each individual country.

  Marx has a particular eye for the ‘iron law of wages’ – Ricardo’s concept that he still embraced in the Manifesto. Now, he unhesitatingly rejects it.

  Even more hateful to him are the hopes that Lassalle and his followers placed in a neutral state. Marx’s views of the existing state were dark. Freedom cannot be sought there, but consists in the state being transformed from a controlling body to a subordinate one.

  The road to freedom passes through ‘the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat’. The concept of the dictatorship of the proletariat thus turns up again here. Between 1850 and the Paris Commune, it was conspicuous by its absence in everything he wrote. It did not disappear by chance, nor was it by chance that it came back in a situation reminiscent of the revolutions of 1848–49. It could still be of use in 1875.

  Marx had expressed the sentiment many times that universal and equal suffrage was an important step on the path towards another society. Now he lessened its significance: it already existed in Switzerland and the United States, he said. It was a truth with a large modification. At the time Marx wrote that, Switzerland had a very particular type of democracy, and in the United States it would be a long time before all men (for example, Native Americans and African Americans) could vote in general elections. Women were given the right to vote in 1920 in the United States, and in Switzerland only in 1971.

  Marx placed less confidence here in the possibility of changing society via the ballot box than he did during his years in the International. The Paris Commune and Bismarck’s hardening grip over German politics had given him new ideas. But the understanding he expressed precisely in his critique of the Gotha programme was not set in stone, either.

  The text on the Gotha programme ends with a sentence in Latin: Dixi et salvavi animam meam (I have spoken and saved my soul). This origin is found in the Bible, more specifically in Ezekiel 3:19; it is known in the wording Marx used from the Roman Catholic Bible. Marx had unburdened his political conscience.69

  His political influence did not increase in Germany after the criticism; if anything, it decreased. When both he and Engels left the party, not even Liebknecht felt that they both could play a role any longer for its continued development.70

  The development of the new, united Social Democratic Party underwent a strange trajectory. In 1878, Bismarck forced through his ‘Anti-Socialist Law’ (or, as it was officially named, Gesetz gegen die gemeingefährlichen Bestrebungen der Sozialdemokratie, the Law against the public danger of Social Democratic endeavours). The law, in force between 1878 and 1890, simply banned the party and with it all socialist propaganda as well. Even so, individual Social Democrats could be elected to governing bodies. Their influence grew, even during the years the law was in force. It was a matter of pride for Bismarck that the law remained on the books, but his defence had fateful consequences for himself; this law more than anything contributed to him being forced to leave his post as chancellor. It was rejected with him, and German social democracy emerged even stronger from its struggle for recognition. In 1890, the party was more organized than any other political party up to that point, and its election results were brilliant.71 Engels realized early on that if anything, the prohibition would strengthen the cause of the workers in Germany. The Anti-Socialist Law will favour us, he declared in 1879. ‘It will complete the revolutionary education of the German workers.’72

  Marx would never live to see whether Engels had been right in his predictions. As we have seen, he devoted himself in his final years to studies in a number of different fields, and what he made public was limited to various brief corrections and forewords to new editions. He rebuked a seriously erroneous history of the International; authored a brief foreword to a new edition of his reckoning with Proudhon, The Poverty of Philosophy; worked up a ‘Workers’ Questionnaire’ for a French socialist periodical; and he and Engels together wrote a series of short articles in which Engels’s typical style shows through.73 During these years, Marx’s health worsened, at the same time that he was once again in full swing testing the foundations for his social theory. In politics, there was above all one area that occupied his thoughts: developments in Russia.

  The Russian Road

  Marx did not publish much at the end of his life. After the French version of Capital in 1875, it was not much more than sporadic trifles. The rumour that he had given up or left all the responsibility to Engels began to stick. Franz Mehring, who published the first full-scale biography of Marx in 1918, felt called upon to emphasize that his subject did remain continuously active up until the end. This did not prevent David Riazanov, the untiring publisher of Marx’s and Engels’s writings, to assert in his double biography of both men that from 1873 Marx was in such a bad way that he was only capable of devoting himself to his always incomplete Capital project. The idea turns up even later, at least in the English literature. David McLellan circulated it in his biography from 1973. Even Tristram Hunt fell victim to the same idea in his book on Engels from 2009; Gareth Stedman Jones does the same in his biography of Marx.74

  On the contrary, the thousands of pages of excerpts and other notes that Marx produced at the end of his life testify to his inexhaustible energy. A careful study of these shows that he was busy re-examining much of what he had previously conclud
ed, and in particular, broadening his horizons.

  Several outstanding specialists have brought up the idea of speaking about ‘the late Marx’ of the 1870s and early 1880s, in contrast to ‘the young Marx’ before 1850 and ‘the mature Marx’ of the 1850s and 1860s. Above all, Polish-British sociologist Teodor Shanin and Japanese historian Haruki Wada have advanced this idea. Wada developed it in a monograph in Japanese, later providing a summary in the 1983 anthology Late Marx and the Russian Road, which Shanin edited. Shanin himself contributed an article on the subject; two British sociologists, Derek Sayer and Philip Corrigan, agree with the main thesis but also want to accurately define it.75

  What is there to say about this? The division itself into distinct periods seems exaggerated to me. It is reminiscent of what music historians usually say about Beethoven and literary historians about Strindberg. Unity can be glimpsed behind the boundaries drawn up.

  It is easy to recognize Marx in everything he wrote, from the 1840s to the 1880s; at the same time, he was an author and thinker who constantly re-examined his theses. This is seen most clearly as regards politics. The ‘late Marx’ that Wada and Shanin speak about is in many respects Marx after the Paris Commune of 1871. But there is yet another principal moment of change: the interest in things Russian.

  Ever since his youth, Marx had seen the Russia of the tsars as the great menace. Early on, it is true, he had got to know radical Russian emigrants who represented an entirely different Russia. But it was only when some of these exiles decided to translate Capital into their own language that his interest in Russian culture and Russian society awakened in earnest. When one of his friends, Nikolai Danielson, sent him a book in Russian by one N. Flerovsky about the working class in Russia, he became so interested that he decided to teach himself Russian. After a hectic period of learning he could spell out Flerovsky’s text, and he was impressed by it.76

  His interest in Russia would soon increase further; the most important inspiration came from the Paris Commune. By reading additional Russian literature – especially texts by Nikolai Chernyshevsky, the most outstanding author and intellectual of the time – he came in contact with the powerful Russian political current called narodniki, or ‘Friends of the People’. (The name comes from narod, the Russian word for ‘people’.) It was, as Teodor Shanin points out, a very broad movement, with everyone from revolutionary terrorists to peaceful philanthropists.77

  Chernyshevsky belonged to the radical wing and was its most influential author. The tsarist regime found him entirely too dangerous and had jailed him in the 1860s. As a prisoner, he wrote his most read and admired work: What is to be Done?, a didactic novel that played an enormous role in his home country. But the texts by Chernyshevsky that Marx was above all influenced by were on the one hand an article on the Russian peasant commune (obshchina) and on the other a few fictional letters that dealt partially with the same subject.

  In these texts, Chernyshevsky declared that he was a follower of neither Schelling’s nor Hegel’s systems, but that he had learned from the theses of these philosophers that the highest form of development resembled the first, original stage more than the intermediate ones. Chernyshevsky applied this thesis to Russian developments. Critics usually say that the peasant community, characterized by common ownership, is primitive in relation to the private ownership of land. But is there not another form that is higher than private ownership, a form that repeats important elements in the original obshchina?78

  It is this idea that took hold of Marx. The immediate background to his fascination lay in his conviction that the Commune of 1871 represented a higher social form than the one that capitalism had produced. He drew additional inspiration from the literature by Lewis H. Morgan and others on primitive societies, from which he enthusiastically composed excerpts.

  He had reason to attempt to formulate his understanding a few times on issues that concerned the future of Russia. Part of it was that his name had become well known in radical Russian circles through the translation of Capital. In 1877, the Russian periodical Otechestvennye zapiski (Notes from the Homeland) had commented on the book, and Marx found reason to write a clarification in which he questioned whether Russia was following the Western European pattern of development. He never completed the text; Engels found it among the piles of manuscripts he went through after Marx’s death.79

  There were also several longer drafts of a letter to the Russian revolutionary Vera Zasulich, who was in exile in Switzerland after having carried out an assassination attempt in St Petersburg. Zasulich had been deeply influenced by Capital, but had got into discussions with a number of other Russians about what Marx’s writing could mean for the future of Russia. Her opponents, who called themselves Marxists, maintained that Russia necessarily had to go through a capitalist stage for the country to achieve a classless society. As proof, they found in Marx such things as a quote in Capital that England had undergone development and other countries had to follow.80

  Marx took Zasulich’s questions very seriously. He wrote three longer drafts as a response but discarded them all and only sent a fourth, significantly shorter one. One central piece of information was common for all the drafts: the quote from Capital that he cited in the draft to Otechestvennye zapiski only said that the West European countries were fated to go through the same development as Great Britain. He thus did not comment there about the future of Russia.

  On the other hand, in only one of the drafts – the one he wrote first – did he take up Zasulich’s reference to some Russians that saw themselves as Marxists. ‘The Russian “Marxists” of whom you speak are quite unknown to me,’ he said, with deprecating quotation marks around the term ‘Marxist’. The Russians he knew had opinions directly opposed to theirs, he assured her. There was no inevitable dissolution of common peasant property in Russia, not even for Marx himself.

  In the typical Russian village, the obshchina, property was held partially in common. Such ownership was threatened when capitalism began to permeate Russia. But the development was not inexorable, Marx assured her.

  In all four drafts, Marx argued against a deterministic understanding of Russian developments. Only the wording was different; Marx was evidently striving to find the right formulations to express his standpoint. He emphasized that Russia did not need to go through the same technological development as western Europe. Steam power had a long history before it was able to transform industry and communications in Western Europe, but now it was available to be put to immediate use in Russia as well. It was thus with all types of technology. Russia should simply be able to hop over the development that marked Western Europe.

  But Marx’s reasoning, which varied from draft to draft, also contains other elements. In the ‘first’ draft (which probably was written as number two in order), he also cites Lewis H. Morgan’s theses on ‘primitive societies’, quoting his words that archaic forms of society were reborn in more advanced societies. Here, an entirely different pattern is cited. Humanity’s path led from homogeneous societies through splits and conflict back to a unity that is more complex and advanced than the first one. It is Hegel’s dialectic that ultimately seems to be guiding his thoughts, although it is Morgan he cites.

  In the next breath, Marx emphasized that knowledge about the dissolution of early societies is extremely imperfect and sketchy. Those familiar with the subject knew that it was often war that tore communities to pieces. But certain forms of common ownership turned out to be more viable than others. Marx recalled that in his own home districts outside Trier (that is, Hunsrück), archaic forms characterized by large common lands had survived up to the present time.

  Clarity can only be obtained from this uneven picture if it is regarded purely theoretically and normal conditions of life are reckoned with. The requirement Marx imposed is rather obvious: all the conformities to laws that science can establish are valid under certain ideal circumstances.

  The crucial factor with Russian village communities is
that, unlike older societies with common ownership, they are not built on blood ties. It thus constitutes a higher form, which he designates communes agricoles – agricultural communities or, if you like, agricultural communes. Within this form, circumstances can cause great variations.

  Marx also pointed out that Russia was suited to this form through the quality of its soil. He was quite simply optimistic about the possibility of developing it to a higher level. But, he said by way of conclusion, this required a Russian revolution.

  So ends the longest draft of his response. But he obviously was not satisfied with it, and it is easy to understand why: he took up entirely too many threads, and the quote from Morgan opened up a historical and philosophical discussion whereas the reasoning about the purely theoretical standpoint faces towards scientific theory.

  He thus made a third attempt, concentrating there on different variations of primitive societies. He set the Russian and the German village communities against each other. The German form did not yet exist at the time of Julius Caesar. It is not known when it arose, but Marx called it medieval and also brought out his home districts as a robust example. What was new, on the other hand, was that he emphasized that there was attention between the common and the private and agricultural communes, and that this tension could lead to their dissolution. But this was not an inevitable development. He pointed to different variations in Russia, but broke off abruptly in mid-sentence.81