I’ve been reading this book, Late Marx and the Russian Road, edited by Teodor Shanin. (New York, Monthly Review Press, 1983.) The book is a resource for anyone who might want additional marxology for reading Marx as aleatory materialist. It also offers fodder for an aleatory understanding of aleatory materialism (ie, a chance to be consistent at the meta level), such that Althusser and his idiom has no monopoly on the effects or substance - or better yet, practices - which he calls aleatory materialism. Rather, these can had via other means, and have been on occasion.
The middle third of Shanin’s book consists of a letter from Vera Zasulich to Marx, Marx’s four drafts of a response, and the short response Marx finally sent.
Zasulich writes
” [T]here are only to possibilities. Either the rural commune, freed of exorbitant tax demands, payment to the nobility and arbitrary administration, is capable of developing in a socialist direction, that is, gradually organising its production and distribution on a collectivist basis. In that case, the revolutionary socialist must devote all his strength to the liberation and development of the commune. If, however, the commune is destined to perish, all that remains for the socialist, as such, is more or less ill-founded calculations as to how many decades it will take for the Russian peasant’s land to pass into the hands of the bourgeoisie and how many centuries it will take for capitalism in Russia to reach something like the level of development already attained in Western Europe. Their task will then be to conduct propaganda solely among the urban workers, while these workers will be continually drowned in the peasant mass which, following the dissolution of the commune, will be thrown on the streets of the large towns in search of a wage. (98.)
Zasulich asked that Marx write something on this that her group could publish. Marx refused something for publication, because he preferred the People’s Will group to the Black Repartition group which Zasulich was part of (the two were on bad terms). In refusing he said he had already promised the People’s Will group something on this subject, which available evidence suggests he never wrote and which he may have never actually promised, which would make this a lie done presumably in order to somewhat diplomatically state his loyalties. Part of Marx’s preference seems to have been that he (by this time, not always, the book charts some of this development) and the PW preferred the first option of the two which Zasulich poses, while the BP preferred the second. I’m not up on this history and I haven’t had time to read the long essay provided by the editor on Russian history and so forth, as the book’s due back to the library.
In addition, he replied
“In analysing the genesis of capitalist production, I said: “At the heart of the capitalist system is a complete separation of … the producer from the means of production … the expropriation of the agricultural producer is the basis of the whole process. Only in England has it been accomplished in a radical manner … But all the other countries of Western Europe are following the same course” (Capital, French edition, p. 315) The ‘historical inevitability’ of this course is therefore expressly restricted to the countries of Western Europe. (…) The analysis in Capital therefore provides no reasons either for or against the vitality of the Russian commune. But the special study I have made of it (…) has convinced me that the commune is the fulcrum for social regeneration in Russia. But in order that it might function as such, the harmful influences assailing it on all sides must first be eliminated, and it must then be assured the normal conditions for spontaneous development.
Zasulich and Plekhanov were not happy at this letter, likely for its rebuffing of their group and for its theoretical content which conflicted with their own theory - and by doing so undermined their position in relation to People’s Will. They never published the letter. David Ryazanov, then director of the Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute in Moscow, wrote that when he discovered the drafts of the letter he wrote to Zasulich and Plekhanov, both of whom claimed that Marx never wrote back to Zasulich. Ryazanov recalled having heard rumors of such a reply, though, and so kept looking until the reply was unearthed. (127-129.)
In the first draft of this letter (which Shanin’s book argues is chronologically the second draft, Ryazanov made a mistake in how he ordered the drafts when he discovered them), Marx wrote:
“The history of the decline of primitive communities (it would be a mistake to place them all on the same level; as in geological formations, these historical forms contain a whole series of primary, secondary, tertiary types, etc.) has still to be written. All we have seen so far are some rather meagre outlines. But in any event the research has advanced far enough to establish that: (1) the vitality of primitive communities was incomparably greater than that of Semitic, Greek, Roman, etc. societies, and, a fortiori, that of modern capitalist societies; (2) the causes of their decline stem from economic facts which prevented them from passing a certain stage of development, from historical surroundings not at all analogous with the historical surroundings of the Russian commune of today.
When reading the histories of primitive communities written by bourgeois writers it is necessary to be on one’s guard. They do not even shrink from falsehoods. Sir Henry Maine, for example, who was a keen collaborator of the British Government in carrying out the violent destruction of the Indian communes, hypocritically assures us that all the government’s noble efforts to support the communes were thwarted by the spontaneous forces of economic laws! (107) (…)
In the words of an American writer [L H Morgan] quite free from any suspicion of revolutionary tendencies and subsidised in his work by the Washington government, “the new system” towards which modern society tends “will be a revival in a superior form of an archaic social type”. So we must not let ourselves to be alarmed at the word “archaic”. (107) (…)
Theoretically speaking, then, the Russian “rural commune” can preserve itself by developing its basis, the common ownership of land, and by eliminating the principle of private property which it also implies; it can become a direct point of departure for the economic system towards which modern society tends; it can turn over a new leaf without beginning by committing suicide; it can gain possession of the fruits with which capitalist production has enriched mankind, without passing through the capitalist regime, a regime which, considered solely from the point of view of its possible duration hardly counts in the life of society. (112.)
(…)To expropriate the agricultural producers it is not necessary to chase them off their land, as was done in England and elsewhere; nor is it necessary to abolish communal property by means of an ukase. Go and seize from the peasants the product of their agricultural labour beyond a certain measure, and despite your gendarmerie and your army you will not succeed in chaining them to their fields! In the last years of the Roman Empire, the provincial decurions — not peasants but landowners — fled from their houses, abandoning their lands, even selling themselves into slavery, all in order to get rid of a property which was no longer anything more than an official pretext for extorting money from them, mercilessly and pitilessly.
From the time of the so-called emancipation of the peasants the Russian commune has been placed by the State in abnormal economic conditions and ever since then it has never ceased to overwhelm it with the social forces concentrated in its hands. Exhausted by its fiscal exactions, the commune became an inert thing, easily exploited by trade, landed property and usury. This oppression from without unleashed in the heart of the commune itself the conflict of interests already present, and rapidly developed the seeds of decay. But that is not all. At the expense of the peasants the State has forced, as in a hothouse, some branches of the Western capitalist system which, without developing the productive forces of agriculture in any way, are most calculated to facilitate and precipitate the theft of its fruits by unproductive middlemen. It has thus cooperated in the enrichment of a new capitalist vermin, sucking the already impoverished blood of the rural commune.
… In a word, the State has given its assistance to the precocious development of the technical and economic means most calculated to facilitate and precipitate the exploitation of the agricultural producer, that is to say, of the largest productive force in Russia, and to enrich the “new pillars of society”. (114.)
In the second draft he writes that “[w]hat threatens the life of the Russian commune is neither a historical inevitability nor a theory; it is state oppression, and exploitation by capitalist intruders whom the state has made powerful at the peasants’ expense.” (105.) In the third draft he writes that “[p]rimitive communities are not all cut according to the same pattern.” (118.)
In the first draft Marx also references the late stage Roman Empire, which I think he got in part from Morgan (114), and which comes up again in a letter of November 1877 to the editorial board of Otechestvennye Zapiski. The letter is a response to a critic of Marx’s who took Marx to task for his philosophy of history. Marx in the letter alleges he has no such philosophy, which strikes me as a bit of a distortion, rather Marx had probably changed his mind and no longer had such a philosophy - much of his work is certainly amenable to having such a philosophy of history. One might say this is Marx claiming to be an aleatory materialist.
“The chapter on primitive accumulation does not pretend to do more than trace the path by which, in Western Europe, the capitalist order of economy emerged from the womb of the feudal order of economy. It therefore describes the historic movement which by divorcing the producers from their means of production converts them into wage earners (proletarians in the modern sense of the word) while it converts into capitalists those who hold the means of production in possession. In that history, “all revolutions are epoch-making which serve as levers for the advancement of the capitalist class in course of formation; above all those which, after stripping great masses of men of their traditional means of production and subsistence, suddenly fling them on to the labour market. But the basis of this whole development is the expropriation of the cultivators.
“This has not yet been radically accomplished except in England….but all the countries of Western Europe are going through the same movement,” etc. (Capital, French Edition, 1879, p. 315). At the end of the chapter the historic tendency of production is summed up thus: That it itself begets its own negation with the inexorability which governs the metamorphoses of nature; that it has itself created the elements of a new economic order, by giving the greatest impulse at once to the productive forces of social labour and to the integral development of every individual producer; that capitalist property, resting as it actually does already on a form of collective production, cannot do other than transform itself into social property. At this point I have not furnished any proof, for the good reason that this statement is itself nothing else than the short summary of long developments previously given in the chapters on capitalist production.
Now what application to Russia can my critic make of this historical sketch? Only this: If Russia is tending to become a capitalist nation after the example of the Western European countries, and during the last years she has been taking a lot of trouble in this direction – she will not succeed without having first transformed a good part of her peasants into proletarians; and after that, once taken to the bosom of the capitalist regime, she will experience its pitiless laws like other profane peoples. That is all. But that is not enough for my critic. He feels himself obliged to metamorphose my historical sketch of the genesis of capitalism in Western Europe into an historico-philosophic theory of the marche generale [general path] imposed by fate upon every people, whatever the historic circumstances in which it finds itself, in order that it may ultimately arrive at the form of economy which will ensure, together with the greatest expansion of the productive powers of social labour, the most complete development of man. But I beg his pardon. (He is both honouring and shaming me too much.) Let us take an example.
In several parts of Capital I allude to the fate which overtook the plebeians of ancient Rome. They were originally free peasants, each cultivating his own piece of land on his own account. In the course of Roman history they were expropriated. The same movement which divorced them from their means of production and subsistence involved the formation not only of big landed property but also of big money capital. And so one fine morning there were to be found on the one hand free men, stripped of everything except their labour power, and on the other, in order to exploit this labour, those who held all the acquired wealth in possession. What happened? The Roman proletarians became, not wage labourers but a mob of do-nothings more abject than the former “poor whites” in the southern country of the United States, and alongside of them there developed a mode of production which was not capitalist but dependent upon slavery. Thus events strikingly analogous but taking place in different historic surroundings led to totally different results. By studying each of these forms of evolution separately and then comparing them one can easily find the clue to this phenomenon, but one will never arrive there by the universal passport of a general historico-philosophical theory, the supreme virtue of which consists in being super-historical.”(134-135.)
Dunayevskaya discusses this and other material in her essay “Marx’s unchaining of the dialectic” here.
Shanin’s book closes with an essay of his, which is worth reading. He notes, like Althusser in the late work, that Marxism’s efficacy when it has existed has been the result of an encounter between Marxism and another tradition or idiom (or more than one). Shanin’s essay begins with a few paragraphs that I like very much and which are rather resonant with Ranciere.
“A century ago marxists regardless of brand or interpretation were no more than one of the many competing groups of European radical dissent striving for social justice. In a major ideological change of scene, a single century has seen the global acceptance of marxism, by friend and foe alike, as the main socialist and revolutionary tradition, idiom, and legitmation. To its followers it came also to equal science. This equation of marxism = socialism, revolution (and science), came to hide some major characteristics of a whole range of actual revolutionary and socialist movements and of theories, marxist and non-marxist; their real history and diversity, the original breadth of their questions and insights, the ways they related to spontaneous popular cravings and struggles for social change. As with all fetishisms, that simplification or concealment weakens the capacity of its socialist followers to effectively use social analysis. (…) Bureaucrats and doctrinaires, the world over, love the simplicity of such models and historiographies and do their best to enforce them by all the massive powers at their command. One way to breach that particular wall of deceptive simplicity and conscious manipulation is to question the relation between marxism and the indigenous revolutionary tradition”
or as Shanin also calls it, the vernacular revolutionary tradition. (Page 243, Shanin, “Marxism and the Vernacular Revolutionary Traditions,” in the book p243-275.) Shanin also offers a definition and etymology of vernacular from the OED: “native, indigenous, not of foreign origin or of learned formation.” It comes from the the Latin verna, meaning a home-born slave. Shanin writely questions the home vs foreign distinction, but I find the slave resonance interesting. This also fits with Ranciere, and with late Althusser speculations on the workers movement without marxism, and the rejection of the Kautsky-Lenin doctrine of ‘trade union consciousness’ being the limit of the working class without the help of the extra-proletarian socialist intellectual party leaders.