Clearly, the reasoning had become too much for him. An investigation into the various types of simple societies with large amounts of common ownership would require an entire dissertation, and Marx was not ready to write that. He thus satisfied himself with a much shorter, fourth version in which he began by explaining that he had delayed his response (it had been twenty days) because he had been struck with an illness that he had periodically suffered from for over ten years. That was why he could not write anything intended for publication. He just established, once again, the fact that in Capital he only expressed an opinion on Western Europe and gave no proof either for or against the viability of the village community. On the other hand, he had gathered material from original sources that convinced him that the village community was the ‘point of support for Russia’s social rebirth’.82
It is thus the later material that he was trying to bring to the fore in the three drafts, but without having succeeded. Marx was, and remained, the master of the unfinished work.
After Marx died, Engels wanted to have the drafts published, as well as the fragment intended for Otechestvennye zapiski. But the Russians concerned delayed the process, and a Russian translation was published only in 1886. It roused differing feelings. Many who saw themselves as carrying Marx’s line further, including Lenin, tried to minimize the significance of the letter. David Riazanov, the scholarly publisher of Marx’s and Engels’s writings, even maintained that texts testified to Marx’s intellectual capacity having declined.
Haruki Wada asserts that the negative reactions were early examples of a powerful tendency to protect their own image of Marxism against Marx’s own words.83 It is easy to agree with him. The drafts do not testify to any reduced intellectual vitality, but surely to an exciting new orientation to a large complex of problems that was difficult to survey.
The Forms of Politics
On the whole, Marx’s fundamental social theory had retained its identity since the mid-1840s. His political understanding, on the other hand, underwent several sudden changes, especially from the 1850s up until his death.
Considering the essential features of his thinking, this changeability is hardly surprising. The distinction between the content of the society and its form is crucial. The content is the interaction between the forces and the relations of production. In Marx’s time, it was thus the relationship between the productivity of labour on the one hand, and the struggle between capitalists and workers on the other. Politics, on the other hand, was one form this content took. Form is extraordinarily important; it is there that a social class can change its conditions in competition with other classes. But, at the same time, the political stage is changeable. Opportunities open and close. Sometimes periods of calm prevail; the established power is unchallenged. But new possibilities in the face of the future crop up, and then it is a matter of seizing the day.
Marx was thoroughly optimistic about the possibility of decisive changes. He was not a meek and cautious commentator; on the contrary, he was quick to point out the new and epochal. So it was under the revolutionary years of 1848–49, so it was when the British Workers’ Parliament assembled in 1854, and so it was in the face of the economic crisis that gathered over Europe after the mid-1850s. He was hesitant before the International at first, but gradually became increasingly hopeful in the face of the opportunities to assemble the international workers’ movement for a decisive showdown with capitalists and landowners. We saw how, during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71, he revealed uneasiness about creating a new Paris Commune on the model of 1792. But once the Commune existed, he saw not the past but the future in it. Contact with the Russian narodniki got him to develop ideas on another path towards the society of the future than the one that ran through Western European capitalism.
This time as well, his hopes for revolutionary change got support from a concrete political event. When war broke out between Russia and Turkey he was sure that the Turks – ‘the gallant Turks’ – would be victorious. He wrote to his friend Sorge that this victory would trigger a revolution in Russia. He said that he himself had carefully studied official and unofficial sources that his friends in St Petersburg had let him acquaint himself with, which is why he knew that the country was already ‘in a state of decomposition’ before the war.84
When it turned out that, despite his conjecture, Russia came out of the war victorious and the regime could gather its forces in order to take the wind out of the radical opposition, Marx did not give up. It was then that he composed his drafts, borne by unmistakable optimism, to Zasulich.
The lines of bright optimism are bordered by an equally long series of dark disappointments. The disappointments made him angry rather than sorrowful. There was one disappointment that probably vexed him more than any other: the development of Great Britain. British trade union members had got him to involve himself in the International, and during the movement’s years of success he believed that the British working class was now ready for revolution. But nothing came of it; everything ended in compromises. At the very end of his life, just before Christmas 1882, he wrote to his daughter Laura that he was delighted by the success of his theory in Russia, which was, with England, the guarantor of the old society.85 England and Russia were now placed on the same level, and his hope was in Russia.
Marx often spoke about revolution, but he was critical of those who had that word on their lips at all times. In the same letter to his daughter Laura, he praised what her husband Paul had recently written. Previously, he had been repulsed by ‘certain ultra-revolutionary turns of phrase’ that were best left to the anarchists. Marx’s own view on revolutions was rather simple. Like the bourgeoisie once did, only the working class itself can break its chains. It only has to be equipped with a proper theory. But revolutionary opportunities are just that – opportunities – characterized by chance.
In discussions on the similarities and differences between Marx and Engels, it is often said that Engels was marked to a greater degree than Marx by the strong evolutionism of the nineteenth century. In his opinion, society developed fundamentally in the same way as nature did. Marx, on the other hand, emphasized more the significance of upheavals.
Marx typically imagined an uninterrupted evolution – a constant increase – of productive forces under capitalism, whereas, on the contrary, the capitalist method of production itself is conservative. One day, this method of production would burst, but his basic theory – the theory in Capital – does not say when this will take place. There is a reason he was entirely too optimistic as soon as signs of a revolutionary development could be anticipated. He constantly believed that the limit had been reached.
The most fruitful Marx research of the last two decades – which concentrated on the German ‘neue Marx-Lektüré’ (new Marx reading) and the American Temporal single-system interpretation, or TSSI (see above, p. 448) but also blossomed in France, perhaps chiefly through Étienne Balibar – asserts that the crucial point in Marx’s theory is the relations of production, rather than the forces of production.86 The gap between Marx’s and Engels’s ideas has thus been emphasized more than previously. Engels was undoubtedly a man of the productive forces, and this applied even more to the next generation of followers with Karl Kautsky at their head. The similarity between the theories of Darwin and Marx was emphasized again and again, at the price of both being depicted in a vulgarized and superficial manner.
The difference between Marx and Engels is especially important in the area of politics. Marx spoke about the state needing to be transformed, becoming only an administrative unit over the long term. Engels, on the other hand, made use of metaphors such as the state ‘withering away’ or ‘dying’. People seemed to become only the instruments of society’s own natural processes.
The boundary between species development and humanity’s historical development is more clearly marked in Marx than in Engels.87 At the same time, the difference should not be exaggerated. It is not even certain th
at Marx and Engels themselves were fully aware of it. In their mutual correspondence, Marx spoke incessantly about ‘our theory’.
We should remember that there was for a long time a certain degree of confusion regarding the content of the terms socialism and communism. This confusion did not lessen during the 1860s and 1870s.
Wolfgang Schieder makes an important observation in his book about Marx as a politician. In 1842, German political scientist Lorenz von Stein published his pioneering work Sozialismus und Kommunismus des heutigen Frankreichs, in which he spoke about socialism as a science of society. Marx took over this usage early on, and did not change it when he had heavily critical viewpoints, for example of what he called utopian socialism. When Engels began talking about his and Marx’s theory as scientific socialism, he thus deviated from Marx’s original conception, Schieder says. He is thinking of Engels’s works Anti-Dühring and Die Entwicklung des Sozialismus von der Utopie zur Wissenschaft (Socialism: Scientific and Utopian, translated by Edward Aveling). But Marx actually wrote a foreword to the French translation of the latter work, in which he spoke about ‘what might be termed an introduction to scientific socialism’.88
This is hardly a question of a landslide in Marx’s linguistic usage. On the one hand, he is referring to a scientific discussion in which different interpretations are freely contrasted with each other, and Fourier, Saint-Simon, Proudhon, and Marx himself give their interpretations free rein. On the other hand, he has in mind what he (for the time being) sees as true, and here he agrees with his own and Engels’s interpretation. There is nothing strange in this. It only becomes odd when the term ‘scientific socialism’ hardens into a dogma with which other interpretations – regardless of how well founded they may be – are forcibly opposed.
Schieder notes in passing that in some early writings, the term communism signifies a movement, ‘eine Bewegung’, but draws no conclusions from this.89 But is it not helpful to imagine that socialism signified the doctrine or theory itself, and communism the party that would gather the workers behind it? No, the usage was not so unambiguous. For Marx (and not only for him!) communism also became the term for a certain type of society.
Starting with the Paris Commune, it became completely so. As we have seen, Marx said that the Commune represented ‘pure communism’ (above, p. 559), and he took a few additional steps in the same direction in his criticism of the Gotha programme a few years later. There, he differentiated between a higher and lower stage of communism; the harmonic balance between people’s abilities and their needs is reached only in the higher stage.
This is the statement that his followers made the starting point for rigidly dogmatic further elaboration. The first stage of communism was dubbed socialism, and only the second one simply communism. In the Soviet Union, this became a profitable basis for all kinds of schematism. But that is a later story.
The newcomer to the flora of concepts, which came into existence after the revolutions of 1848–49, is the concept of social democracy. Its country of origin is Germany; from there, it spread above all to the Nordic countries and Russia. The word ‘democracy’ retains its radical character of popular governance, in which the people – the great mass – are understood in contrast to the elite holding power. It is still assumed by most that universal and equal suffrage would mean that the capitalists as well as the landowning aristocracy would be swept from power if the majority actually had the last word.
The word ‘socialism’ retained its ambiguity, but normally meant that the conditions of ownership would be radically changed. In its radical interpretation, ownership of the means of production – land and capital – would be subjected to joint administration under democratic control.
But from the very beginning, social democracy took different forms. The party that Lassalle founded was thus social democratic; as will be remembered, the party newspaper was called Der Sozial-Demokrat. Like his early followers, Lassalle saw a possibility for social democracy in an alliance with the landowners against the capitalists. The competing party founded by August Bebel and Wilhelm Liebknecht already had the word ‘social democracy’ in its name; when both parties united at the conference in Gotha, this became the joint term that later marched triumphantly throughout northern Europe. Battles soon flared up within the party in Germany over whether a revolution was a necessary condition for achieving the desirable type of society; in Russia, the party split into two competing tendencies, the Mensheviks and the Bolsheviks. But this is also a later story.
As far as is known, Marx did not describe himself as a social democrat. But nonetheless, the united Social Democratic Party in Germany became ‘our party’ for him and Engels. With his merciless criticism, he tried to turn it in the right direction.90
After the interlude of the International, Marx would again more wholeheartedly express his opinion that the revolution was a necessary path towards a classless society. But he did not perceive the revolution primarily as a bloody reckoning; rather, as the breakthrough for a new social order. Once this was established, the former ruling powers would certainly attempt to retake the position they had lost; casualties would then be unavoidable. Engels, the old military man, was significantly more bellicose in his way of talking about revolutions.
14
Statues, Malicious Portraits,
and the Work
A book that we read for the first time develops unpredictably, like life itself. But upon rereading, the text steers purposefully towards its conclusion. The reader already knows how it goes; the first lines herald the last ones. This is also how we regard the person who has died. In the child, we anticipate the sum total of their life. Every step in their development is preparation for what is to come.
In his autobiography Words, Jean-Paul Sartre wrote a few memorable lines on the matter:
In the drawing-rooms of Arras, a cold, simpering young lawyer is carrying his head under his arm because he is the late Robespierre; blood is dripping from it but does not stain the rug; not one of the guests notice it, whereas we see nothing else; five years will go by before it rolls into the basket, yet there it is, cut off, uttering gallant remarks despite its hanging jaw.1
The same applies to Karl Marx. But it is perhaps not the dead Marx at his writing desk, white-bearded and consumed by illness, that obscures the view of his life and work. If anything, he disappears behind his colossal horde of interpreters and followers – and even more behind the political parties and states that quoted him and his writings. Where is the living Marx, under this crowd?
It is hoped that a part of the answer has emerged in the preceding chapters. But now we must consider the part of his history that followed his death, when he remained a constant presence – beloved and canonized, but also hated and defamed, and often misunderstood – among both admirers and slanderers.
Since Marx’s influence is so enormous, this presentation must necessarily be rather a number of short paragraphs about the innumerable branches that are called the history of Marxism. A full-scale presentation would require several volumes. Such volumes already exist, although all of them came to be during the period when the Soviet Union still existed. The most extensive of these is the three-volume work by Polish-British philosopher Leszek Kołakowski, published in English translation in 1978 as Main Currents of Marxism. It is a very knowledgeable work, marked by the author’s bitter experiences of Polish communism. As in his other great works, Kołakowski uses an organic metaphor to understand the development of an ideological phenomenon: first budding, then flowering, and finally withering away. Contemporary Marxism, he argues, is dying.2
Predrag Vranicki develops another view in his 1972–74 work, Geschichte des Marxismus. Vranicki lived in Yugoslavia (specifically, what is today Croatia) and was part of the regime-critical Praxis group, which sought to renovate Marxist theory in their home country. His history breathes not only dissatisfaction with the condition of things, but also a certain degree of optimism about the future of Marxism.3
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More limited thematically and in number of pages, but important in its effort, is Perry Anderson’s 1976 book Considerations on Western Marxism. Anderson, a British Trotskyist thinker, sees the various Marx-inspired theories that developed above all in Western Europe as fundamentally idealistic: ideas, not political realities, are bandied about.4
In the brief version of the history of Marxism that follows here, the view is directed at how later interpreters and followers relate to Marx and his work. This summary presentation will serve to provide a basis for the final question of how Marx today, more than a quarter-century after the fall of the Berlin Wall, appears in light of all that has been done and written with either actual or alleged inspiration from him.
The Road from Highgate to the Winter Palace
It was Engels who gave the speech on the day in March 1883 when Marx was buried in Highgate Cemetery in North London. The group at his graveside was not a large one. Eleanor Marx was there, of course, but not her sister Laura. On the other hand, Laura’s husband Paul Lafargue was there, as well as Charles Longuet, the husband of the recently deceased Jennychen. Lenchen Demuth was there, but not her son Freddy. Friedrich Lessner, who had followed Marx the whole way from Neue Rheinische Zeitung to London and remained one of his closest confidants, was among the group of mourners, as was another veteran of the 1840s, Georg Lochner. Wilhelm Liebknecht represented the German Social Democrats. Two outstanding natural scientists, both equally convinced of the greatness of Marx’s social theory, paid him the final honours: the chemist Carl Schorlemmer and the biologist Ray Lankester. Gottlieb Lemke, one of the many London Germans, laid a wreath with a red band from the party newspaper Der Sozialdemokrat and from the German education association for whom Marx had meant so much.
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