Marx is often read as a determinist author, theorist of a historical process leading to the necessary overcoming of capitalism. Part of his late work invites us to nuance this reading.
Marx’s encounter with the Russian populists at the end of his life, and the transformation of his thought that followed, are often mentioned, but rarely studied as such. Certainly, existing works, notably those of Theodor Shanin, but also of Maximilien Rubel, addressed this change and underlined its importance. However, no study precisely thematized the effort that Marx made to adapt his thought to a social reality that he ignored for a long time: that of Russian rural communities.
Orthodox Marxism, the dominant current in Marxian studies, is based on a forgetting, voluntary or not, of this late and decisive development of Marx. The contribution of the work of Mickaël Löwy and Paul Guillibert is therefore twofold. The contribution is first of all theoretical: Marxian studies remain too focused on the work of the young Marx, focused on alienation, as well as on Capital and his radical critique of political economy. Without seeking to minimize their importance, it is clear that the later writings of the 1870s and 1880s are either minimized, if not ignored. The rediscovery of these texts not only constitutes the opportunity to exhume previously unpublished drafts, it forces us to reread the entire historical and political philosophy of Marx, and to completely reconsider his intellectual heritage.
The Russian commune as a model
Marx is often seen as the thinker of a history governed by necessity. Capitalism constitutes the decisive stage, doomed to be overcome by its own contradictions to make way for a classless society. Largely based on a socio-economic study of Western Europe, Marx’s analyzes tend to universalize a geographically limited model.
Russian populists offer another route to communism. The term does not have the meaning we give it today: described by the authors as a movement “ revolutionary romantic », it is a socialist political action group, which appeared around 1870, opposed to the policies of the Tsar. Under the influence of Chernyshevsky, and in particular his 1863 novel What to do ?, they seek to apply socialism in a way that takes into account Russia’s own social conditions. In Communal possession of land, Chernyshevsky supports the possibility, say the authors, of “ starting from the communal agrarian tradition of the peasants to lead Russia towards democracy and socialism “. (p. 13). Indeed, Russian society has a specific organization, the rural commune – the mir, Or obshchina. The land is distributed collectively, shared between the different farmers according to their needs. Based on this observation, the populists believe that Russia can access socialism based on this already existing rural organization, to generalize it.
As a political movement, Russian populism therefore has three components: the establishment of a peasant society against the abuses of tsarism, the central role of mir conceived as a social model which anticipates realized socialism, and finally, the most important point in the intellectual evolution of the last Marx, the defense of a “ specifically Russian path to socialism » (p. 12).
Thus, taking the rural pre-capitalist societies of Russia as a model, they intended to abolish the power of the Tsar without forcing Russian peasants to go through all the stages of capitalism. In other words, and it is on this point that Marx, if not changes, at least broadens his vision of things, they think of the possibility of a communism which would occur directly on the basis of the Russian communes, and not from the collapse of a moribund capitalism. Such a design has the advantage, say the authors, of saving “ to the Russian people the miseries of capitalism » (p. 14). Beyond their differences, populists agree on the overcoming of bourgeois society by pre-modern rural political and social organization: they therefore advocate a historical path of emancipation which differs profoundly from that posed by Marx.
What communism for Tsarist Russia ?
Marx studies populist writings, and above all draws a radical lesson from them: the analyzes of Capitaltoo Euro-centric, do not apply to the specificities of Russia. Orthodox Marxism was built on the basis of a truncated reading of Marx, taking for dogmatic truths what in reality only concerns a fragment of the work, and seems to omit the developments of his work and his thought. “ Capitalism is not destiny », summarize the authors (p. 41): from now on, for Marx, according to him, the capitalist stage, with all the suffering it entails linked to the domination of one class over another, is no longer necessary.
Following his reading of Chernyshevsky, it was the correspondence with Vera Zasoulitch that allowed Marx to complete his intellectual transformation. Understanding it requires going back in detail to the arguments given by Zasoulitch as well as their resumption by Marx. This letter, dated March 8, 1881, but also its four preparatory drafts, which remained unpublished until their publication in 1924, pose the following question: Is Russia obliged to go through the stage of capitalism in order to achieve socialism? ? This is not, according to Marx, a necessary step. The process for which he is best known, namely the expropriation of producers in order to build up capital and then widespread proletarianization, does not apply to Russia. The analyzes of his major work are mainly valid for the model specific to Western Europe. This is the central argument of the late Marx’s thought: his analyzes are not intended to be universalized and extended to other geographical regions. There are several paths to communism.
The second point is that the course of history is not one-way, but depends on material relationships and social conditions of existence. These different conditions require thinking differently. The 1882 preface to Communist Party Manifesto inflects the mechanical determinism present in the text of Marx and Engels. They take up what the letter to Zasoulitch allows us to glimpse, and analyze the possibility for Russia of becoming the scene of a communist revolution which would dispense with capitalism. Compared to the 1848 text, the evolution is notable, since we move from a linear and almost mechanical dynamic to the discovery of a plurality of possible historical trajectories. The argument, in this preface, however, remains substantially the same, but with one nuance: Russia’s access to communism certainly follows a specific path, but remains conditional on the emergence of the proletarian revolt in the West.
Plural Marxisms
Does the forgetting of this Marx influenced by Russian populism come from a desire to explicitly mask an insufficiently Marxist Marx from the eyes of his heirs? ? These late writings did not benefit from publication and dissemination as widely as Capitalhence their lesser celebrity. The oversight could be explained simply by this editorial delay. Sometimes discovered very late, it seems logical that they did not exert such a significant influence in Marxian studies.
Another reason, however, appears more interesting and, in the eyes of the authors, more decisive. Deeply political, it refers to a purely ideological and militant desire on the part of his heirs. We can broadly draw the common denominator, which the authors summarize in the following formula, as striking as it is true: the orthodox Marxists would have forgotten the letter to Zasoulitch “ by their inability to admit that Marx could have written a document so little “ Marxist “. » (p. 66). Faced with a letter so at odds with their vision of Marxism – frozen in 1859 », Marx’s followers would have preferred censorship to recognizing themselves as more dogmatic than the master.
This sidelining is found among Marx’s intellectual heirs: Lenin, Trostsky and Rosa Luxemburg tend to reduce the role of the Narodnik, and their contribution in the reception of Marx’s work. The main cause of this forgetting thus comes from the Marxist tradition constructed from a simplistic reading: “ The specter of fatalism haunts this Marxism » (p. 63). However, Marx’s response to Zassoulitch cracks the evidence of a thought transformed into a rigid system. Marx goes so far as to criticize Marxists who claim to continue his work without following his method. It then appears to the thinker that he really is: not a dogmatic preacher, but a philosopher attentive to socio-historical particularities and keen to adapt his thought to them. Far from constituting a simple shift or nuance, Marx Narodnik invites a complete rereading of Marx, beyond the ideological prism imposed by tradition.
Is this evolution of Marx’s thought accompanied by real effects? ? What were, if any, the concrete results of this mutation in Marxian thought? ? The latter Marx arouses interest that goes far beyond academic circles and specialists in Marxist thought. The authors take the risk of extending this vision to developing countries, and to any so-called peripheral country. In fact, this book, and this is its advantage, allows us to think about an adaptation of the principles inherited from Marx to non-European societies. In this, Marx Narodnik is not limited to a purely textual sphere: the authors show that this late inflection of Marx manifests itself concretely in certain social movements which confirm the validity of the thesis of the Russian populists. Thus, the social movement launched by José Carlos Mariátegui in 1928, which considers the Peruvian peasant masses as a revolutionary subject in their own right, echoes populist theses: socialism in Peru, but also in all of South America, must not be a simple copy of the solutions applied to Western countries, but must take the form of a “ Inca communism », based on the community forms of Andean societies, theayllu and the marka. These common organizations resemble mir Russians. Proof, if any were needed, that history does not follow a single trajectory, and that each social situation calls for a social solution adapted to its specificities. Here too, in the vein of correspondence, the paths to socialism are multiple.
Marx mobilizes a method, more than a set of fixed results. This intellectual flexibility is illustrated in the formula reported by Engels according to which Marx affirmed: “ all I know is that I’m not a Marxist “. Even more clearly, for Theodor Shanin, unlike his self-proclaimed disciples, but also orthodox Marxists, “ Marx refused to draw social reality from his own books » (p. 48). He never rejects a social fact under the pretext that it would contradict his own writings, and Marx like Engels do not hesitate to label their own ideas as obsolescent as soon as reality finds them wanting. More than a set of results, they mobilize a method which sometimes requires profound changes in thinking. It is therefore not only an unpublished text that Marx Narodnik brings to light, not even just another Marx that we discover there, but an invitation to reread and rethink his work in the light of contemporary social issues.