A World to Win

by Sven-Eric Liedman

  64.Shlomo Na’aman, Ferdinand Lassalle: Deutscher und Jude: Eine sozialgeschichtliche Studie (Hannover: Schriftenreihe der Nieders-ächsischen Landeszentrale für politischen Bildung, 1968), takes up Lassalle’s fate as a Jew and a socialist agitator in nineteenth-century Germany. The latest major work on Lassalle is Thilo Ramm, Ferdinand Lassalle: der Revolutionär und das Recht (Berlin: Berliner Wissenschaftsverlag, 2004). On Lassalle’s death, see the letter from Engels to Marx, 4 September 1864, MEGA III/12, p. 634f, MEW 30, p. 429, CW 41, pp. 55ff; and Marx’s response, 7 September 1864, MEGA III/12, p. 637, MEW 30, p. 432, CW 41, pp. 560ff. A good overview of Marx’s and Lassalle’s different views on working-class strategy is Roger Morgan, The German Social Democrats and the First International, 1864–1872 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965), pp. 2f, 20ff. The correspondence between Bismarck and Lassalle, which became known and published only in 1928, is easily accessible on Marxists.org.

  65.The latest biography of Wilhelm Liebknecht is Wolfgang Schröder, Wilhelm Liebknecht: Soldat der Revolution, Parteiführer, Parlamentarier (Berlin: Karl Dietz Verlag, 2013); the latest on Bebel is Jürgen Schmidt, August Bebel: Kaiser der Arbeiter (Zürich: Rotpunktverlag, 2013).

  66.On the Marx clique, see Roger Morgan, The German Social Democrats and the First International, 1864–1872 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965), pp. 59; on Marx, the International and the social democratic parties in Germany, ibid., pp. 168ff and passim.

  67.Cover letter to Wilhelm Bracke, 5 May 1875, MEW 19, pp. 13f, CW 45, pp. 69–73. Engels to Bebel 18/28 March 1875, ibid., pp. 3–9 and 60–6 respectively. Engels’s letter to Bracke, 11 October 1875, MEW 34, pp. 155–63 and CW 94–103. Engels’s criticism, however, lacks the sharpness of Marx’s more heavy-handed reckoning.

  68.Engels’s foreword to Marx’s criticism, ibid., pp. 521f and CW 27, pp. 92f.

  69.Marx, ‘Kritik der Gothaer Programms’, MEGA I/25, pp. 9–25, MEW 19, pp. 15–32, CW 75–99. The quotes, ibid., MEGA I/15, pp. 10, 11f, and 15, MEW 19, pp. 16, 17f, and 21; CW 24, pp. 81, 83, 87. On the ‘revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat’, MEGA I/25, p. 22, MEW 19, p. 28, CW 24, p. 95. On the dictatorship of the proletariat, Schieder, Karl Marx, 1991, 34.

  70.Liebknecht’s statement according to Schieder, Karl Marx als Politiker, p. 117.

  71.Heidi Beutin, Wolfgang Beutin, and Holger Malterer, 125 Jahre Sozialistengesetz: Beiträge der öffentlichen Konferenz von 18.–30. November 2003 (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2003) provides a splendid picture of the Anti-Socialist Laws and their consequences.

  72.Engels, ‘Sulle attuali condizioni della Germania e della Russia’, MEGA I/25, pp. 169f, German translation MEW 19, pp. 148f, English translation, CW 24, pp. 251f.

  73.Marx’s reckoning with George Howell, once a member of the International, was published in The Secular Chronicle, 4 August 1878, MEGA I/25, pp. 151–7, MEW 19, pp. 142–7, CW 24, pp. 234–9; his foreword to the 1880 edition of The Poverty of Philosophy in MEGA I/25, p. 198, MEW 19, p. 229, CW 24, pp. 236f; his ‘Questionnaire for Workers’ with numerous questions about labour, health, and so on, ibid., pp. 199–207, 230–7, and 328–34 respectively.

  74.Franz Mehring, Karl Marx: hans livs historia (Stockholm: Gidlunds, 1983), pp. 710ff. David Riazanov, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels: An Introduction to Their Lives and Their Work, trans. by Joshua Kunitz (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1973), 205ff. David McLellan, Karl Marx: His Life and Thought (St Albans: Paladin, 1973), pp. 425–30. Tristram Hunt, Friedrich Engels: Kommunist i frack (Stockholm: Leopard förlag, 2009), pp. 305f. Stedman Jones, Karl Marx, pp. 535ff.

  75.Haruki Wada, ‘Marx and Revolutionary Russia’, in Teodor Shanin, Late Marx and the Russian Road: Marx and ‘The Peripheries of Capitalism’ (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1983), pp. 40–75, and Derek Sayer and Philip Corrigan, ‘Late Marx: Continuity, Contradiction and Learning’, in ibid.

  76.N. Flerovsky was a pseudonym for Vasilii Bervi. His book dealt with the condition of the Russian working class and was thus a parallel investigation to Engels’s writings about English conditions from 1845. Marx wrote to Engels that this was the most important book about the condition of the workers since Engels’s own. Letter of 10 February 1870, MEW 32, p. 437, CW 43, pp. 423f. Marx read Bervi’s work carefully, as indicated by his own copy with many margin notes, see MEGA IV/32, p. 147.

  77.Shanin, Late Marx and the Russian Road, p. 8.

  78.Chernyshevsky’s What Is to Be Done? is available in English translations, the earliest from 1886. Excerpts from the texts by Chernyshevsky that influenced Marx can be found in a new English translation, Nikolai Chernyshevsky, ‘Selected Writings’, in Shanin, Late Marx and the Russian Road, pp. 181–203.

  79.Marx’s draft of a reply to Otechestvennye zapiski, ‘L’article ‘Karl Marx devant le tribunal de M. Joukowski’, MEGA I/25, pp. 112–17.

  80.Letter from Zasulich to Marx, 16 February 1881, is reproduced in works such as Shanin, Late Marx and the Russian Road, pp. 98f.

  81.Marx’s drafts to Zasulich in the original French, MEGA I/25, pp. 219–40, in German in MEW 19, pp. 384–406, and in English in Shanin, Late Marx and the Russian Road, pp. 99–123 as well as in CW 24, pp. 346–69. The second draft first, Wada, ‘Marx and Revolutionary Russia’, pp. 64f.

  82.Letter from Marx to Vera Zasulich, 8 March 1881, MEGA I/25, pp. 241f, MEW 35, pp. 166f, CW 46, pp. 71f and Shanin, Late Marx and the Russian Road, pp. 123f.

  83.Wada, ‘Marx and Revolutionary Russia’, pp. 41f.

  84.Letter from Marx to Friedrich Adolph Sorge, 27 September 1877, MEW 34, p. 296, CW 45, p. 278.

  85.Letter from Marx to Laura Lafargue, 14 December 1882, MEW 35, pp. 407f, CW 46, pp. 398f. On Marx’s disappointment over England, see also Schieder, Karl Marx als Politiker, p. 98.

  86.On the priority of the relations of production, see Etienne Balibar, Cinq etudes du matérialisme historique (Paris: Maspero, 1974), p. 119.

  87.In contrast to Engels, Marx never used the metaphor of the state withering away (Anti-Dühring), while it was carried further with emphasis by Lenin in State and Revolution. Marx only said that the state would lose its compulsory character (Zwangscharakter) and assume the form of an association. Many of his interpreters have observed this. See for example Schieder, Karl Marx als Politiker, p. 19.

  88.Stein, Der Sozialismus und Kommunismus des heutigen Frankreichs. Schieder, Karl Marx als Politiker, pp. 20ff. Socialism: Utopian and Scientific is reproduced in Aveling’s translation in CW 24, pp. 281–325. Marx’s foreword, MEW 19, pp. 181–5, CW 24, pp. 335–9.

  89.Schieder, Karl Marx als Politiker, p. 22.

  90.Both Marx and Engels used the term ‘our party’ many times – Marx did so, for example, in the very central document Critique of the Gotha Programme; see MEGA I/25, p. 15, MEW 19, p. 22, CW 24, p. 87, and Schieder, Karl Marx als Politiker, p. 139.

  14Statues, Malicious Portraits, and the Work

  1.Jean-Paul Sartre, Orden (Stockholm: Bonniers, 1964), pp. 200f.

  2.Leszek Kołakowski, Main Currents of Marxism: Its Rise, Growth, and Dissolution (Oxford: Clarendon, 1976).

  3.Predrag Vranicki, Geschichte des Marxismus (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1972–74).

  4.Perry Anderson, Considerations on Western Marxism (London: Verso, 1976).

  5.A draft of the speech at Marx’s grave is reproduced in MEW 19, pp. 333f, CW 24, pp. 463f; the article in Der Sozialdemokrat, 22 March 1883, ibid., pp. 335–9 and 467–71 respectively. Liebknecht’s brief speech is also reproduced in this text. Engels published an additional article in the same newspaper on 3 May 1883 in which he reproduced a long series of other honours from various corners of the world, ibid., pp. 340–7 and 473–81 respectively.

  6.Engels’s speech in Zürich, MEGA I/32, p. 375, CW 27, pp. 404f; on the painting that depicted Marx, in the corresponding Apparatband, 1289, as far as is known, the painting has not been preserved. Margarete Greulich was the daughter of Hermann Greulich, the vice-chair of the organizational committee of
the congress. On Eleanor Marx’s reluctance, see Rachel Holmes, Eleanor Marx: A Life (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), p. 316.

  7.The socialist William Diack reproduces the scene with Eleanor and the man who thought he knew better in History of the Trades Council and the Trade Union Movement in Aberdeen (Aberdeen: Aberdeen Trades Council, 1939), p. 62. Since then, the scene has been reproduced many times, the latest in Holmes, Eleanor Marx, p. 351.

  8.Die Jungen are dealt with in Dirk H. Müller, Idealismus und Revolution: zur Opposition der Jungen gegen den sozialdemokratischen Parteivorstand (Berlin: Spiess, 1975) and Peter Wienand, ‘Revoluzzer und Revisionisten’, Politische Vierteljahresschrift 17 (1976), among other works. In his autobiography Jünglingsjahre, Paul Ernst wrote that, bored by Schmoller’s lectures in Berlin, he bought the first volume of Capital and found in it an intellectual clarity that Schmoller lacked. ‘Ich kam von Schmoller zu Marx und kam wie in den himmel’, he wrote and continued: ‘Ja, das war der Führer den ich brauchte’ (Yes, that was the leader I needed); Paul Ernst, Jünglingsjahre (München: G. Muller, 1931), p. 166. Ernst’s enthusiasm was brief, however, and he gradually moved far to the right on the political scale. In 1933, the year in which he would die, he became a member of the Prussian Akademie der Künste after the purge of the Jews.

  9.Engels to Joseph Bloch, 21 September 1890, MEW 37, pp. 462–5, CW 49, pp. 33–7.

  10.Eugen Dühring, Cursus der Philosophie als streng wissenschaftlicher Weltanschauung und Lebensgestaltung (Leipzig: Erich Koschny, 1875), pp. 2 and 14f. On eternal ethical truths, ibid., p. 192ff. Engels on platitudes, MEW 20, p. 83, CW 25, p. 83.

  11.Engels to von Boenigk, 21 August 1890, MEW 37, pp. 447f, CW 49, pp. 18ff.

  12.Engels to Kautsky, 13 December 1890, MEW 37, pp. 522f. Marxist orthodoxy in Karl Kautsky, Karl Marx’ oekonomische Lehren gemeinverständlich dargestellt und erläutert (Stuttgart: J. H. W Dietz, 1910), p. viii. Marx’s Critique of the Gotha Programme was published in Die Neue Zeit, no. 18, vol. 9.

  13.On the Erfurt programme, Karl Kautsky, Das Erfurter Programm in seinem grundsätzlichen Theil erläutert (Stuttgart: J. H. W. Dietz, 1899). On ethics in the materialist conception of history, Karl Kautsky, Ethik und materialistische Geschichtsauffassung: ein Versuch (Stuttgart: J. H. W. Dietz, 1910).

  14.On intellectual maturity, Eduard Bernstein, Die Voraussetzungen des Sozialismus und die Aufgaben der Sozialdemokratie (Hamburg: Rowohlts Klassiker, 1969), p. 11; on the changeability of theory, p. 39. The standard work on revisionism and its development is Helga Grebing’s work on the subject. She begins with a very broad determination of the concept, and then follows a meandering road from Bernstein, Austro-Marxism, and Lukács up to the Prague Spring of 1968; Helga Grebing, Der Revisionismus von Bernstein bis zum ‘Prager Frühling’ (München: Beck, 1977). A somewhat older, all-round anthology of articles on various aspects of revisionism is Leopold Labedz, Revisionism: Essays in the History of Marxist Ideas (London: George Allen and Unwin Ltd, 1962), with interesting contributions from scholars such as Christian Gneuss, Leszek Kołakowski, and Sibnarayan Ray.

  15.Georgi Plekhanov, ‘Zu Hegel’s sechzigstem Todestag’, Die Neue Zeit (1891/92). Engels’s assessment of Plekhanov’s article in a letter to Kautsky, 3 December 1891, MEW 38, p. 235, CW 49, p. 317.

  16.Engels wrote about Labriola in a letter to Friedrich Adolph Sorge, 30 December 1893: ‘Er ist strikter Marxist’ (He is a strict Marxist), MEW 39, p. 188, CW 50, p. 250. Labriola’s letters to Engels are published in Antonio Labriola, Lettere a Engels (Rome: Rinascita, 1949). Labriola’s views on historical materialism are seen in Labriola, Saggi sul materialism storico (Rome: Editori Riunati, 1977).

  17.Lenin is an extraordinarily controversial figure; this marks the great amount of literature about him, which is difficult to grasp. A rather new biography, characterized by sound criticism of sources and nuanced assessments, is Robert Service, Lenin: A Biography (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000). In What Is to Be Done? (1902), Lenin violently attacks what he calls the ‘worship of spontaneity’ (Lenin, Collected Works 5, p. 367), by which he meant the belief that ‘the masses’ could achieve a social revolution without leadership. He argued that on their own, workers could develop a trade union consciousness but not a political one. This required a well-organized party under the leadership of professional revolutionaries (see in particular pp. 464ff).

  18.On Lenin as the creator of the theory of the party, see Ralph Miliband, Marxistisk politik: en analyserande discussion kring den marxistiska inställningen till politisk praktik (Stockholm: Bonnier, 1980), pp. 107–10 and Schieder, Karl Marx als Politiker, pp. 130ff.

  19.Lenin, ‘The Three Sources and Three Component Parts of Marxism’, Collected Works 19, 1913, pp. 24–8.

  20.Ernst Mach, Beiträge zur Analyse der Empfindungen (Jena: G. Fischer, 1886). On the conflict between Mach and Einstein, see Gerald J. Holton, ‘Mach, Einstein and the Search for Reality’, Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, vol. 6 (1970), pp. 165–99.

  21.Lenin’s letters from this period create complete clarity in the background for Materialism and Empirio-Criticism: the opposition between Mensheviks and Bolsheviks, in which the Bolsheviks were the followers of Lenin’s theory of the party. To his sorrow, Lenin now saw that Plekhanov, the leading theoretician of the Mensheviks, sided against Mach, while Bogdanov and a number of other Bolsheviks on the contrary abandoned the realist theory of knowledge in favour of Mach’s standpoint; see Lenin’s letter to Anatoly Lunacharsky, 1 August 1905, Lenin, Collected Works, 43, pp. 161f. Lenin found this upsetting; his opponents could not be the only ones with what he saw as a correct Marxist understanding. He corresponded with revolutionary author Maxim Gorky on the subject. In a long letter, he said that he had read a manuscript by Bogdanov and had been gripped by an ‘unbelievable fury’. The Bolsheviks had gone philosophically astray. On top of all this Die Neue Zeit – the leading theoretical journal for Marxists – had published an announcement that said that Bogdanov represented the Bolsheviks, and Plekhanov on the other hand the Mensheviks. Letter to Gorky, 25 February 1908, Lenin, Briefe (Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1967), pp. 138–45. (The letter is not reproduced in Lenin’s Collected Works; neither is the following.) Gorky did not find the matter so crucial, proposing reconciliation between the quarrelling parties. Lenin replied angrily that reconciliation was not possible on such an issue. It was a matter of either/or, the Mensheviks were on the point of winning. Letter from Lenin to Gorky, 24 March 1908, Lenin, Briefe, pp. 149ff. A meeting nevertheless took place at Gorky’s estate on the island of Capri. Lenin’s biographer Robert Service gives an account of the meeting, which was without result regarding the issue of contention. The opposing parties mostly played chess with each other. Lenin became furious when he lost. Service does not realize, however, why the issue of Mach seemed so important for Lenin, who absolutely wanted to see doctrines from metaphysics to political tactics as a unity, a monolith. Service, Lenin, pp. 190–6. On a Marxist left with a weakness for Nietzsche’s philosophy, see Seth Taylor, Left-Wing Nietzscheanism: The Politics of German Expressionism (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1990).

  22.Lenin made his notes between September and December 1914 – that is, during the first autumn of the war. They were not published until 1929. Here I have started out from V. I. Lenin, Materialismus und Empiriokritzismus (Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1962), pp. 95–238. On Machism, p. 132.

  23.‘On the Question of Dialectics’, ibid., pp. 355–63.

  24.An exhaustive, partially sympathetic depiction of the revolution and the period up until 1923 is Edward Hallett Carr, A History of the Soviet Union, 14 vols (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1950–78). One outstanding description of the entire history of the Soviet Union is Manfred Hildermeier, Geschichte der Sowjetunion, 1917–1991 (München: C. H. Beck, 1998).

  25.Isaac Deutscher’s three-volume biography of Trotsky is written by a sympathizer who was also a good historian. Deutscher does not try to tone down the massacre in Kronstadt, even if he is eager to
emphasize that Trotsky only unwillingly let it happen. Isaac Deutscher, The Prophet (London: Verso, 2014), pp. 522ff.

  26.A few of the most important contributions in the battle over the dialectic have been gathered in the anthology Abram Deborin and Nikolaj Bukharin, Kontroversen über dialektischen und mechanischen Materialismus (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1969). Oskar Negt, ‘Marxismus als Legitimationswissenschaft: zur Genese der stalinistischen Philosophie’, in ibid., is a valuable introduction. More detail about Deborin in particular can be found in René Ahlberg, Dialektische Philosophie und Gesellschaft in der Sowjetunion (Berlin: Osteuropainstitut, 1960). Stephen F. Cohen, Bucharin och den ryska revolutionen: en politisk biografi 1888–1938 (Lund: Arkiv förlag, 1971), pp. 129–45, which attempts to show that Bukharin cannot be called a mechanist in this context. It is clear that he was not extreme in his viewpoints, but he was the most influential opponent of the interpretation that Deborin advocated. Mark Mitin, ‘Uber die Ergebnisse der philosophischen Diskussion’, in Deborin and Bucharin, Kontroversen über dialektischen und mechanischen Materialismus, in particular pp. 330–42. On Stalin in the philosophers, see further Wladislav Hedeler, ‘Stalin und die Philosophen’, Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie, vol. 39 (1991). On Lysenko, see ibid., p. 524.

  27.Eric Hobsbawm, Ytterligheternas tidsålder: det korta 1900-talet 1914–1991 (Stockholm: Rabén Prisma, 1997), pp. 106–31.

  28.John Peter Nettl, Rosa Luxemburg (London: Oxford University Press, 1966), remains the standard biography of Luxemburg.

  29.Helga Grebing, Der Revisionismus von Bernstein bis zum ‘Prager Frühling’ (München: Beck, 1977), pp. 70–92 on Lukács. An interesting and important collection of articles on Lukács, written by a number of his most outstanding students, is Agnes Heller, Lukács Revalued (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1983). Karl Korsch, Marxism och filosofi (Stockholm: Rabén & Sjögren, 1972) is a book with obvious points in common with Lukács. Korsch, however, made no apologies.