Notes on the Reprint of Late Marx and the Russian Road Edited by Teodor Shanin

ABSTRACT

The reprint of Late Marx and the Russian Road on the 200th anniversary of Karl Marx’s birth offers a valuable opportunity to discuss the impact of this path-breaking miscellaneous volume on Marx scholarship. The first aim of this paper is to highlight the original approach of the work, which looked at Marx’s views on Russia from a different perspective to those of previous studies. This paper then deals with the main criticism raised by critics regarding the line of argument advanced in the book. Emphasis is placed on two aspects: (1) the debate over whether Marx believed in the possibility of socialist development in Russia without a proletarian revolution in the Western countries; (2) the argument that the shifts in Marx’s perspective after 1870 were not limited to his writings on the Russian question, which were part of a wider rethink of the political forms suitable for the emancipation of labour from capitalist exploitation.

KEYWORDS:

• Karl Marx
• Paris Commune
• Russian commune
• Teodor Shanin
• Vera Zasulich

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on Contributor

Nicola D’Elia is an independent scholar. His main fields of research are the history of socialism and the labour movement between the end of the nineteenth century and the First World War, and the history of the German–Italian cultural relations in the interwar period. He has published the books Democrazia e “modello inglese”: Eduard Bernstein scrittore politico nell’esilio di Londra (1890–1901) (Florence 2005), and Delio Cantimori e la cultura politica tedesca (1927–1940) (Rome 2007).

Notes

1 A short version of the article by Sayer and Corrigan is included in Late Marx and the Russian Road under the title “Late Marx: Continuity, Contradictions and Learning” (cf. Shanin 2018a, 77–94).

2 Shanin (2018b, 22) himself noted that “to Engels, the future of the Russian commune was inevitably subject to proletarian revolution in the West, itself part of the irresistible march of ‘progress’,” whereas “Marx was moving away from such views.”

3 Stedman Jones (2016, 591) added that Engels “had never been enthusiastic” about late Marx’s interest in the obshchina and, after his friend’s death, strove to ensure that Marx’s views on the Russian village commune were forgotten.

4 For a more extensive discussion of this topic see D’Elia (2018).

5 See in particular Marx’s letters of December 8, 1880, to Henry M. Hyndman and of February 22, 1881, to Domela Nieuwenhuis (Marx and Engels 1992, 49, 67).

6 In the second draft of The Civil War in France, Marx specified that “the first condition for the holding of political power” by the working class “is to transform the traditional working machinery and destroy it as an instrument of class rule” since “the political instrument of their enslavement cannot serve as the political instrument of their emancipation” (Marx and Engels 1986, 533).

7 In this regard, Marx’s letter of February 22, 1881, to Domela Nieuwenhuis is meaningful (cf. Marx and Engels 1992, 66).

8 On this point, see Cinnella (2014, 171) and Lindner (2010, 36).