Marxism and the vernacular revolutionary traditions

ABSTRACT

Marxism has been the name increasingly given by friend and foe to contemporary radical revolutionary movements in the last couple of centuries. That opens the seldom-asked question, what about the radical revolutionary movements and ideas which could not be so described? For them the collective term often used negatively was ‘vulgar’, or, less negative but still unacceptable to Marxists, ‘utopian’ and ‘vernacular’. That last turn indicated spontaneous radicalism of the lower classes, which lack the incise language (polish?) of academic debate. The Oxford Dictionary defines ‘vernacular’ as the ‘language spoken in particular area by a particular group especially one that is not the official or written language’. It introduced often a history-passed-and-third-worldly accentuation. Experience has shown that most effective revolutionary movements were led by a group representing a mixture (interdependence?) of Marxism with vernacular radicalism, often described as Marxism with a ‘xxxx’ face (Chinese or Czechoslovak or something else). One can even conclude that for Marxism to make way it must link with radical local tradition, definitely not-Marxist. Moreover, it doesn’t quite ‘work’ singly, for its success depends on the mixture of Marxism and non-Marxism. It seems that particular role in that confrontation is defined by a conceptual (ideological?) set of collectively dominant ideas or ‘idols’. If so, a major blocking force to the advance of Marxist movements is, on top of the power of the existing state and political economy, some prevailing ideological elements accepted by the ‘masses’ since the Second International. Those would be ‘purism’, ‘scientism’, ‘progressivism’ and ‘statism’. We shall eventually touch in that context on supporting the revolutionary vernacular of the People’s Will party of Russia, its implications and its relations to Marx’s own Marxism.

KEYWORDS:

• Marxism
• Vera Zasulich
• populism
• People’s Will
• agrarian question

Acknowledgements

Thanks are given to those whose comments improved this paper: Perry Anderson, Zygmunt Bauman, Ottar Brox, Noam Chomsky, Philip Corrigan, Boguslaw Galeski, Ernest Gellner, Iris Gillespie, Leopold Haimson, Andrzej Kaminski, Elfi Nunn, Ron Petrusha Zillur Rahman, Shulamit Ramon, Raphael Samuel, Derek Sayer, Israel Shahak, Paul Sweezy, Daram Vir, Leon Zamosc.

We thank Teodor for enthusiastically agreeing to our proposition, and for re-reading and re-checking the text, and Yunan Xu for re-encoding the text into electronic format.

Notes

1 Editorial Note: The Journal of Peasant Studies (JPS) is republishing this paper by Teodor Shanin – alongside the 1881 letters of Vera Zasulich and Karl Marx – as one of the journal’s contributions to various initiatives worldwide in 2018 marking the 200^th birthday of Karl Marx. In doing so, we also hope that this essay, which appeared originally as a book chapter in Shanin (1983), will become more accessible to JPS readers.

2 Marx has noted (while disputing Bakunin’s view in Statehood and Utopia about the marxist self-definition) ‘[The] words “learned socialism” were never used, while “scientific socialism” was used only to counterpose it to the utopian socialism which attempted to enforce on people new fantasies and illusions, instead of restricting its field to the study of social transformation of those very people; see my book against Proudhon’ (see Marx and Engels 1961, 617). For the much more positive position of Engels on that matter see Marx and Engels (1961, 105, 115) etc.

3 For discussion see, for example Heisenberg (1958, especially 194–206), Einstein (1940), Polanyi (1967), Hagstrom (1965) and, most recently, Smith (1982), etc. See also Shanin (1972).

4 See in particular Kuhn (1970, revised edition).

5 See in particular the work of the so-called Frankfurt School, e.g. the still very potent Marcuse (1964).

6 For a good discussion of the issues involved see Cassirer (1944).

7 Further discussion of relevant aspects of science follows in the section entitled ‘Science and will’.

8 Marx described Francis Bacon as the initiator of contemporary materialism and science. The manifest difference between Bacon’s and Marx’s approach to ‘false consciousness’ was Marx’s powerful accentuation of the historicity of the ‘idols’. For discussion see Sayer (1979).

9 Unmistakably selecting the wrong end of the stick, Althusser suggested in his guide to the readers of Capital, vol. 1, to begin reading it at Chapter 2, and proceed then to its very end, but not to go into Chapter 1 without the supervision of specialists, or else to leave it out altogether (Althusser 1971, 71).

10 The Oxford English Dictionary, Oxford (1933), vol. 12, 137.

11 See, for instance, Illich (1981).

12 The most significant Soviet analyst of the Utopian Socialist movements assigned them in toto to the period of ‘primitive accumulation’ as a specific cultural expression of it. See Volgin (1975). For a contemporary ‘Western’ discussion of major relevance see Bauman (1976).

13 For example, Engels has spoken harshly against Dühring’s tendency to dismiss the Utopian Socialists as simply silly.

14 Lenin (1963), ‘the two tactics of social democracy’ in ‘Democratic Revolution’ and ‘The Two Utopias’, vols 13 and 18, respectively.

15 Should one wish to keep that list precise there were of course two more Internationals: the ‘two and a half’ one of the Social Democratic Left and the fourth one of the Trotskyists.

16 Compare, for example, Cassirer (1944); Chomsky (1968); Kuznetsov (1972) (initially Novosti Press Agency, Moscow, 1972).

17 ‘But what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is that the architect builds the cell in his mind before he constructs it in wax’ (Marx 1976, 284).

18 The first of the ‘Theses on Feuerbach’, in Marx and Engels (1973, 13).

19 While working on Capital Marx was chiefly concerned with the social determination aspect of reality. Yet it is in Capital (Marx 1976, 759) that Marx speaks again about human nature, both ‘in general’ and ‘as historically modified in each epoch’ – in direct continuity with concerns and views expressed in his ‘Early Writings’ and the content of the last decade of his work (see Part I above).

20 A considerable amount of critique of Warren’s evidence and argument is by now in print; see, for example, Lipietz (1982). Whatever the conclusion about those matters, the issue of intellectual origins is more straightforward. Warren believed that his view was a return from later Lenin’s position to those of Marx. It is not. It is a return to the ‘progressist’ interpretation of Marx by the generation of the Second International, as discussed in Shanin (1983) in ‘Late Marx: gods and craftsmen’. In Russia precisely those views were expressed by the so-called ‘legal marxists’.

21 See the thesis developed by Moore (1966), especially part 3.

22 The question was presented with all its philosophical and political sternness in the work of Sartre. For a major contribution by a Soviet scholar see Kuznetsov (1972, 62–65), who traced the issue back as far as the debate about determinism and freedom by Epicurus in Ancient Rome and related it to the contemporary theoretical issues of physics and ethics.

23 See also Lukács (1966).

24 Marx (1973), and its partial restatement in V. Lenin, State and Revolution (written in August 1917).

25 The third of the ‘Theses on Feuerbach’, in Marx and Engels (1973, 13).

26 That is how L. Trepper (Domb), the chief of the legendary ‘Red Orchestra’ network in France of the First World War, has summed up all his lessons of 40 years of service to the Communist movement and the experience of stalinism in it. For his life story see his The great game (1979).

27 See Bloch (1964, 101) (Western precedent).

28 The word meschan’stvo is indeed in constant use by the contemporary Soviet press and common speech when castigating the negative personal characteristics of the ‘new middle classes’ of the USSR.

29 See Kautsky (1913).

30 It is instructive to see how much that debate, once again, cuts across different periods and schools of thought, relating in each of them to their specific social context. Within the theological battles of the period of the Reformation, Erasmus has defended the view that ‘wherever you encounter truth, look at it as Christianity’ for ‘truth is divine’, as against Luther’s demand to ‘remain God’s captive for ever’ laced with German nationalism. See Zweig (1979).

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Teodor Shanin

Teodor Shanin is a professor emeritus at the University of Manchester, Fellow of the Academy of Agricultural Sciences of the Russian Federation, and President of the Moscow School of Social and Economic Sciences. He was a co-editor (together with Terence J. Byres and Charles Curwen) of the Journal of Peasant Studies in 1973–1975.