Karl marx an Intellectual Biography Rolf Hosfeld
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- Salvation from the East
CONSEQUENCES` To the Sun, to FreedomThus, with a certain degree of inevitability, Marx’s political effect was subject to the law of unintended consequences. The history of the International had already shown that Marx’s greatest success came when he acted as a theoretician of union struggle, and that it surpassed its zenith the moment he wanted to proclaim his old chiliastic message of salvation after the Paris Commune. The history of German social democracy would stage anew this struggle between heaven and earth. Even during the 1848 revolution, Stefan Born’s Workers’ Brotherhood—at the time the most important workers’ or- ganization on the continent—was already marked by a “revisionist” softening of communist principles. “We are not conspiring against the existing regime,” Born maintained during the revolutionary days, when he was still a member of the Communist League: “We only want to be allowed our own place in the common Fatherland.”1 The real workers’ movement, as Marx was forced to learn with frus- tration, always revealed such traits of pragmatic softening bound up with the desire for civic recognition. The same problem would re- appear with Lassalle and the British trade unions. Marx therefore watched German social democracy like a hawk. Its history began with Lassalle’s German Workers’ Association, and over the course of time the Social Democratic Party became the first party in the world to explicitly invoke Marx. Above all it was a political entity that kept alive a wide range of traditions from 1848 in a counter-world that withdrew from the official world of the Kaiserreich. The Socialist Workers’ Party of Germany was established in 1875 in Gotha through the amalgamation of Ferdinand Lassalle’s German Workers’ Association, founded in 1863, and the Social Democratic Workers’ Party that Wilhelm Liebknecht and August Bebel founded in Eisenach in 1868. Increasingly under suspicion in the new empire of being vaterlandslose Gesellen (journeymen without a fatherland), party members found strength in Marx’s confidence in history, and especially in the comforting certainty that in the end they would stand with the victors, since developments would inevitably have to proceed along a trajectory in favor of the workers’ movement. Marx- ism established itself on solid ground as a kind of secular religion of redemption; it was revolutionary only within limits, but Bismarck would be powerless against it in the long run. And through futuristic dreams popularized by best sellers like August Bebel’s Woman and Socialism, it seduced hundreds of thousands readers with the conso- lation that the future held a better world where, after the expropria- tion of capitalists, a central plan would allow for a workday of only two or three hours, and where, once exploitation had disappeared, all crime would vanish as well. First published in 1879, Bebel’s book had gone through fifty editions by 1909.2 It contained much about a futuristic world along the lines of Fourier—something that could excite even bourgeois teenagers of the Gründerzeit with its faith in science—and a little Marx.
pose. But the terrible missile occasionally had difficulty reaching its actual readers. However, Arnold Ruge, Marx’s erstwhile comrade-in-arms and later opponent during his time in Paris, conceded without envy that Capital was an “epoch-defining work,” and that particularly the argument regarding surplus value through unpaid labor and the impending expropriation of the expropriators was classically suc- cessful.4 Johann Baptist von Schweitzer reviewed the book in the Social-Democrat, as did the former tanner and autodidact Joseph Dietzgen in the Demokratische Wochenblatt.5 Within Germany’s so- cial democratic movement, Liebknecht and Bebel admittedly con- sidered themselves supporters of Marx, but this essentially pertained to only a couple fundamental programmatic points. Liebknecht felt that workers basically needed to clearly understand three things: first, that labor was the source of all value; second, that capital exploited the workers; and third, that in a social-democratic state wage labor needed to be replaced by an association. Anyone with a scholarly interest beyond that could, naturally, read Capital.6 But Liebknecht himself had practical problems to solve. As he categori- cally informed Engels, Liebknecht was anyway of the opinion that theory and praxis were “two very different things.”7 He let Marx know that he would allow himself to be instructed on theoretical matters but that in the field of practice, compared to the Church Fathers in London, he was “somewhat more proficient.”8 After the unification of the Reich in 1871, the two German workers’ parties had found themselves under increasing pressure from above. Bismarck was gripped by a growing fear of “enemies of the Reich.” At the end of March 1872, Bebel and Liebknecht were sentenced to two years in prison because of their negative at- titude to the Franco-Prussian War and their sympathies for the Paris Commune. After crisis broke out in 1873, the situation grew more severe. In 1874, the General German Workers’ Association was banned in Prussia. During the Reichstag election of the same year, however, Lassallean and Eisenach supporters of Marx campaigned successfully on shared electoral lists. Within the Reich as a whole they obtained only 6.5 percent of the votes, but regionally their suc- cesses were significantly higher in some places. In Hamburg they had 40.7 percent of the vote; in Saxony, 36.2 percent; in Schleswig- Holstein, 32.5 percent; and in Lübeck, 32.4 percent.9 The ban in Prussia, the electoral successes, and the challenges of the crisis en- couraged a unifying mood in both parties. The Lassalleans made an initial offer to the committee of Eisenachers sitting in Hamburg in fall 1874. On 22 May 1875, the party congress for unification took place in Gotha. One hundred twenty-seven delegates represented 29,659 members, the majority of whom were Lassalleans. Even so, Wilhelm Liebknecht was offered the office for dealing with program issues, and he could hardly manage to formulate anything beyond the previously negotiated pragmatic compromise. Ever since the early 1850s when, exiled in London, he frequented Marx’s home, Liebknecht had been a kind of confidant to the two heads of the movement in Germany. “He was my teacher,” he said of Marx, who sometimes, according to Liebknecht, could destroy his enemies with the “aroused seriousness of Tacitus.”10 This aroused seriousness was now directed at him, after the appearance, without the Londoners’ prior knowledge, of a jointly written program draft in the party press in early March 1875. Marx thought that such a reprehensible program that demoralizes the Party, which Liebknecht wanted to present in Gotha and from which Marx and Engels would remain altogether remote, could under no circumstances be recog- nized through diplomatic silence. It contained nothing but a blatant canonization of the Lassallean articles of faith, and the momentary suc- cess of unification was thus purchased far too dearly.11 “Our party could hardly demean itself further,” wrote Engels shortly thereafter, directing his anger at Bebel. “Neither Liebknecht nor anyone else has let us have any kind of information.” Engels suspected that Lieb- knecht had allowed himself to be bamboozled by the Lassalleans. If the program was accepted, he threatened, he and Marx could “never recognise a new party set up on that basis.” Hardly a word in this “insipidly written” program, he maintained, could withstand a seri- ous critique.12 Marx composed comprehensive “Marginal Notes to the Pro- gramme of the German Workers’ Party” and, even prior to the party congress, sent them to Germany. They were a scathing critique of the Gotha program, which in Marx’s eyes did not reject a single one of the slogans once coined by Lassalle. He was especially annoyed by the formulation of the future “free basis of the state.” Which state, he asked, noting that the freedom of the state basically only ex- isted in raising itself above society, so no other state was as free as the despotic state in Russia. The question regarding the transforma- tion of the state into a communist society, in contrast, could only be
Liebknecht prudently kept the text under lock and key, thus as- suring that only a very small circle of comrades were familiar with Marx’s “Marginal Notes.” If “the International had not created such a shameful fiasco,” he shot back somewhat angrily at Engels, the unification would have taken place without problems, and it would have been easy to come together and agree upon the program of the International.14 The latter was in any event, in contrast to Marx’s irate drafts, not really a revolutionary program, as they both knew. Marx’s concept of a revolutionary transition period of a proletarian dictatorship would never play a role in social democracy. His “Mar- ginal Notes” simply disappeared amongst the files and were first pub- lished in 1891, not for political but rather antiquarian purposes—as a document from a bygone era in the history of the Social Demo- cratic Party.15 Only with Lenin and Bolshevism did the Critique of the Gotha Programme acquire the status of a fundamental revolution- ary text. August Bebel took a very long time to respond to Engels’s vehement accusations. He essentially agreed with Engels’s critique of the draft of the program, Bebel wrote to London in September 1875, and he reproached Liebknecht harshly for his willingness to make concessions. But in general, he wrote, “we can be quite satis- fied with the course of the party,” placatingly invoking the mantle of history.16 Marx would never again attempt with such severity to influence German social democracy. Quite the contrary, in fact: he apparently came to terms with the old doctrines, namely that any real movement was better than a dozen programs.17 “The muster-roll of the Social-Democratic party in Germany on the occasion of the general elections,” he wrote en- thusiastically in the beginning of 1877, “has rudely alarmed, not only our amiable German philistine, but also les classes dominantes in England and France.” There was indeed a pleasant contrast be- tween the melodramatic fits and starts of the French and the businesslike way of proceeding of the German socialists.18 Apart from that, with social democratic workers’ parties not only in Germany but also in other countries, he now felt that “instead of dying out, the Inter- national did only pass from its first period of incubation to a higher one where its already original tendencies have in part become reali- ties.”19 Any new revolutionary spark ignited in the course of their sober, day-to-day business would probably concern the outbreak of revolution in Russia, which Marx once again feverishly expected in the wake of the Eastern Crisis of 1877. In this case, however, the Social-Democratic legions at home would be available in Germany and would very quickly convince the cultural philistines that there are more important things in the world than Richard Wagner’s music of the future.20 Marx was never quite able to decide between heaven and earth. Neither did he need to, at this point in time, for the Eastern Crisis ended anyhow with a compromise at the Berlin Congress. Incidentally, as before, the Social-Democratic legions were a hetero- geneous mass that hardly stood especially close to Marx’s theories. The change was more or less the result of coincidence, having some- thing to do with the sudden popularity of the writings of the blind and eccentric independent lecturer Eugen Dühring. Dühring gave lectures outside the university about his concept of a “socialistic” (sozialitär) transformation of the economy and his ethic of natural piety and courageously facing life; hordes of students with social- ist inclinations and nonconformists streamed to these lectures as if they were revelations.21 His voice was soft and his judgments were downright crude. He irreverently referred to Goethe as the Kötchen (little shit) and to Helmholtz as Helmklotz (helmet klutz); he called Gaussian mathematics a “geometry of stupidity.” Shortly thereafter, Dühring also drew attention to himself as a militant anti-Semite when, in his book about the “Jewish question,” he referred to the Jews as an “inner Carthage” “whose power must be broken by the modern nations [Völker] so that they do not themselves have to suffer the destruction by [this Carthage] of their moral and material foundations.”22 But that was in 1880. In the mid 1870s, the doc- trines of this “new Communist” impressed even Bebel, no less so than they did the young bank employee Eduard Bernstein. But when Dühring also took aim at Marx, calling him a “scien- tific portrait of misery” (wissenschaftliche Jammergestalt), Liebknecht boiled over, especially since he had just received an article written for Vorwärts that celebrated Dühring as a “fighter for science.” He pres- sured London for a “sharp reckoning,” but Engels, who was occupied with studies for his Dialectics of Nature, took his time making up his mind to do it. Marx was not available anyway, because Engels—who incidentally had been residing in London since 1870—was insisting that he complete the two subsequent volumes of Capital. Engels was “pestered … dreadfully,” as he noted in late November 1876, until he had undertaken the “disagreeable task”—“disagreeable because the man is blind so that the contest is unequal.”23 “Anti-Dühring” initially appeared as a series of articles in Vorwärts from January 1877 to July 1878 and then, shortly before the decree of the Anti-Social- ist Laws, also as a book entitled Herr Eugen Dühring’s Revolution in Science, published by Dietz in Stuttgart. This book did more than anything else to spread Marxism throughout continental social democracy. Only after reading En- gels’s popular text about the “superiority of the Marx-Engels theory over all other justifications of socialism” did Bebel and Bernstein appeared to be convinced.24 It was no different for Karl Kautsky, who was later the keeper of Grail of Marxism within social democ- racy, the exiled Russians Georgi Plekhanov and Pavel Axelrod, and the Italian Antonio Labriola. “Only now,” wrote Engels’s biographer Gustav Mayer, “did an actual Marxist school and tradition take form on the continent.”25 In 1889, this development led to the found- ing of the Second International of social democratic parties on an increasingly Marxist basis.26 Marx became a very well-known figure even among European workers. At the beginning of the 1890s, En- gels observed during a trip on the continent that Paris was virtually teeming with Marx medallions, and Germany, Austria, and Switzer- land abounded with plaster busts of Marx.27 Engels’s text against Dühring (Marx contributed substantially to its chapters on economics)28 achieved its great popularity chiefly be- cause it claimed to provide, within three hundred pages of clearly comprehensible language, a “more comprehensive view of the world.” It explained what would later be called dialectical material- ism—in the words of Engels, an “exact representation of the uni- verse, of its evolution, of the development of mankind, and of the reflection of this evolution in the minds of men,” and thus of na- ture, history, and thought. Such a representation, Engels continued, was only possible with the help of dialectics, which “comprehends things and their representations, ideas, in their essential connec- tion, concatenation, motion, origin, and ending.” Even the specula- tive figure of the negation of the negation became thus for Engels an “extremely general—and for this reason extremely far-reaching and important—law of development of nature, history, and thought.” 29 Engels’s text basically represented an attempt, in the form of a polemic against Dühring, to introduce a materialist version of Hegel’s Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences that, in terms of its construct, completely mimicked its Hegelian model. Like Hegel’s text, it began with nature and, after a dialectical progressive move- ment, finished with socialism, which in the Hegelian original cor- responded to Absolute Spirit. It struck a vital nerve in the zeitgeist of an epoch that craved a simple approach to the solution of all of the world’s riddles. Especially among freethinkers, “scientific worldview” was then an increasingly popular buzzword, and Engels was not the only one who opposed the closed worldview of theology and idealistic phi- losophy with a materialistic monism. But Engels considered himself, as a dialectician, vastly superior to authors like Ludwig Büchner, Ernst Haeckel, or Jacob Moleschott, whom he characterized as vul- gar materialists. Additionally, he saw himself as the mouthpiece of the workers’ movement, which, as he wrote a few years later, was the only legitimate “inheritor of German classical philosophy” and the only place where the “German aptitude for theory” remained unimpaired, whereas bourgeois science had long since regressed to “inane eclecticism.”30 Engels was the consequential founder of dia- lectical materialism and so-called proletarian science, which, how- ever, would first come to full fruition during Stalin’s real socialism. For the time being, and especially after the promulgation of the Anti-Socialist Laws, it served social democrats, who were partially forced underground, as a kind of comforting philosophy. Bismarck won an initial battle when he finally managed to railroad a ban on the Social Democratic Party through the Reichstag on 18 October 1878. Two assassination attempts against the Kaiser in late spring that year had provided both the pretext and the required votes. Crown Prince Friedrich opposed the ban because he feared, quite rightly, that Bismarck’s “war of annihilation” against Social Demo- crats would ultimately also affect the Liberals,31 which would have been the reason his wife, Victoria, charged Grant Duff with learn- ing more about Marx. The liberal crown prince, however, did not prevail. Forty-five social democratic newspapers, 1,300 print pub- lications, and over 300 workers’ organizations were banned, and 900 evictions were carried out from areas where the government declared a so-called small state of siege. Around 1,500 people ended up in prison. But despite the prohibitions, arrests, evictions, and ruined lives, social democracy could not be erased from Germany’s political life, especially since the prohibition applied to the party organization but not to the fraction in the Reichstag. During the twelve-year period in which it was banned, the number of social democratic voters in- creased fourfold. As Gordon A. Craig once noted, in an act of a con- servative denial of reality Bismarck had completely underestimated the power of the social transformation.32 He also underestimated the vitality of social democracy itself. Basically, Engels thought, Bismarck was once again working unwittingly “for us.”33 In 1879, a new party newspaper created in Zurich, the Social Democrat, spread throughout the Reich via an illegal postal service and was able to reestablish the connections between the party leadership and the individual party organizations. The first party congress of the Social Democrats in exile, which took place in 1880 at the Wyden castle in Switzerland, sided all the more strongly with Marx’s ideas. After the passing of Bismarck era, the Anti-Socialist Laws were abolished at the end of September 1890. At no time were the masses more aware of the class-based character of state and society than during the almost twelve-year duration of the emergency laws, Bebel reported on this day. Bebel had been shaping the party at least since the 1887 party congress in St. Gallen, and his prognosis about the inevitable “large unholy mess” (großer Kladderadatsch)—that is, the final crisis of the bourgeois world, which in the not-too-distant future would be replaced by a socialist “state of the future”—played a role here as well. In light of the Gründerkrise, which had already lasted longer than ten years, Bebel’s expectation felt very immediate, like something that could happen at any time, almost overnight.34 But the life of day-to-day politics suddenly gained increasing signifi- cance, inserting itself between the hopes for historical automatism and the utopia of a future state. The Erfurt Program of the SPD, resolved in 1891, made this apparent. It was the result of a coop- erative effort by Karl Kautsky, the editor of the social democratic theory journal Neue Zeit, and Eduard Bernstein, who during the last two years of the Anti-Socialist Laws published the weekly journal Sozialdemokrat in London under Engels’s wing. Wholly in the tradition of Marx, Kautsky swore by capital’s pro- cess of concentration and the system’s susceptibility to crisis, con- cluding from this that
But the second part of the Social Democrats’ program, formulated by Bernstein, revealed an unabashed reform-oriented attitude. Ber- nstein believed less and less in the collapse of capitalism. The part of the program for which he was responsible dealt above all with numerous aspects of democratic reform: universal direct and secret voting rights for men and women; direct legislation by the people; a citizens’ militia rather than a standing army; the guarantee of the right to the free expression of opinion, freedom of association, and freedom of assembly; the abolishment of all laws that contributed to the discrimination of women; the designation of religion as a private matter; the secularization of schools; free education and learning materials; free medical care and judicial administration; the elec- tion of judges by the people; the abolishment of the death penalty; and the reform of the tax code. For the protection of workers in particular, the following was demanded: the legal implementation of the eight-hour day; the prohibition of the gainful employment of children; an extensive ban on night work; guaranteed minimum rest periods; making the legal status of agricultural workers and servants equal to that of workers in commerce and industry; securing coali- tion rights for workers.36 Engels thought that the theoretical por- tion of the Program was presentable, but that the practical demands could perhaps do with some corrections.37 He apparently failed to notice that the Program featured the collision of two worlds that did not fit together. Strangely enough, the Erfurt Program’s combination of the prog- nosis of a Kladderadatsch and concrete democratic and social de- mands was precisely what captivated workers struggling for better economic conditions, social security, social recognition, and civic equality. This contradiction would define the social democratic movement until it could finally free itself from its counterworld mi- lieu to become an integrated part of the society and state. The Erfurt Program continued to point the way for decades. Its two authors, however, developed along different political lines: while Kautsky became one of the most influential interpreters of Marxist orthodoxy, Bernstein advocated increasingly openly for a revision of the Marxist understanding of socialism. He was ulti- mately successful, even if Rosa Luxemburg, on the Left within the party, accused him of wanting to transform social democracy into a democratic-socialist reform party and demanded his exclusion from the party.38 “If the triumph of socialism is supposed to be an im- manent economic necessity,” Bernstein wrote in Vorwärts in late March 1899, “then it must be based on the proof of the inevitability of the economic collapse of the present society. This proof has not been provided and it cannot be provided.”39 Bernstein wanted social democracy to have its own Immanuel Kant, someone who would critically view the inherited Marxist theoretical system and “reveal where its apparent materialism [was] the highest and therefore most easily misleading ideology,” because “the contempt of the ideal, the elevation of material factors to omnipotent powers of development” was nothing but a self-deception “that was and is exposed as such by the actions at every opportunity of the people who proclaim it.”40 In the future, a values- and reform-oriented political praxis would be- come the central element of social democratic politics, even though the language of revolution continued to dominate the social demo- cratic milieu for a long time. Was this a result that arose from Marx, subject to the law of unin- tended consequences? In a certain way, yes, for he always called for concrete steps in the struggle of the political economy of the prole- tariat against the political economy of the bourgeoisie and basically thought revolution possible only in exceptional circumstances. But if revolution did not occur, then the development toward social dem- ocratic reformism was simply a necessary realignment in accordance with reality that set in with capitalism’s new phase of prosperity in the mid 1890s—which was no coincidence. Other realignments would at some point be due as well. “Those who create proletarians also create Social Democrats,” Engels called out to his audience at a meeting in Berlin in late September 1893.41 He sincerely believed that, according to the law of linear progression, if the party contin- ued to grow at its previous rate “we shall have a majority between the years 1900 and 1910.”42 But this would never be the case. First, society would never be as polarized as Marx had predicted; second, not all workers were automatically social democrats. Thus, like so- cial democrats in the rest of Europe who had joined the Second International, the party that had been created on the basis of Marx either had to become one among many democratic forces capable of forming coalitions or lapse into the status of a political sect. Marx always considered the latter to be the worst-case scenario. Only he had assessed the course of the real movement, to which he attached such great importance, differently and wrongly—resulting in con- sequences for civil society that, though unintended, were highly beneficial.
If social democracy developed as a critique of the Marxist heaven of ideas from an earthly perspective, then Bolshevism, in contrast, re- instated the unconditional dominion of that heaven. It was the sec- ond unintended consequence of Marx, who did not invent it. But in his old age, he saw Russia become a screen for the projection of almost messianic expectations—even though a phobia of Russia had previously been one of the most constant components of his world- view. Regarding the czarist regime as the most dangerous bulwark of the European Reaction, he had therefore called repeatedly for a revolutionary world war against Russia. Yet he also judged Alexan- der Herzen’s and Mikhail Bakunin’s faith in Russia’s socialist calling to be nothing but a fanatical pan-Slavic conspiracy against civiliza- tion, going so far as to temporarily ally himself with the eccentric conservative David Urquhart simply because Urquhart publicly re- ferred to Lord Palmerston—who during the Ottoman-Russian con- flict stood on the side of Petersburg—as a paid agent of the czar.43 At the beginning of the 1870s, however, his image of Russia began to change. Marx learned Russian44 and immersed himself in the study of Russian agricultural conditions.45 During this period he let his Russian translator of Capital know that in the following volumes he would deal in detail with ground rents in their Russian form. Apart from that, he became interested in Nikolay Chernyshevsky and intended to write an article that would “create some interest in him in the West.”46 Nothing became of either of these intentions, but the great Russian scholar and critic Chernyshevsky rated honorable mention in the afterword to the sec- ond edition of Capital of 1873.47 Chernyshevsky, Marx maintained, had written noteworthy articles on the question “whether Russia should start, as its liberal economists wish, by destroying the rural community in order to pass to a capitalist system or whether, on the contrary, it can acquire all the fruits of this system without suffering its torments, by developing its own historical conditions.” Namely, if Russia, in its agricultural economy, continued to pursue the course of capitalism initiated by the Emancipation Reform of 1861 and the associated liberation of the peasants, it would miss the finest chance that history has ever offered to a nation and instead lose itself in the vicissitudes of capitalism.48 Chernyshevsky’s name was closely associated with the movement of radical intelligentsia in the 1860s in Russia. A man with a Ger- man education, he had studied Hegel and, like Marx, had gained his materialistic worldview by way of Feuerbach, a worldview he first presented in his 1860 work The Anthropological Principle in Philoso- phy. Like many of his intellectual contemporaries, Chernyshevsky was deeply disillusioned with the results of the Emancipation Re- form that Alexander II saw himself forced to undertake after the Crimean disaster. He became a socialist. From prison in 1862/63, he wrote his most famous work, the novel What Is to Be Done? Here he described life in a cooperative where a circle of conspiratorial politi- cal activists operated in the background; their leader, Rakhmetov, an ascetic and battle-hardened professional revolutionary, would later capture Lenin’s imagination.49 But Marx was more interested in Chernyshevsky’s theoretical writings about the future of the Rus- sian village community. Chernyshevsky first mentioned the thesis that it was possible in Russia—and only in Russia—to bypass the phase of capitalistic de- velopment in order to arrive at socialism in an essay entitled “Cri- tique of Philosophical Prejudices Against Communal Ownership.” He was not an outspoken romantic and by Russian standards was something of a “Westerner” unopposed to the technological and scientific progress of capitalism. But he felt that in Russia, it was possible for modernization to operate on a communist basis from the outset by taking the common property of the village community as its point of departure. This, according to Chernyshevsky, would be a negation of the negation of archaic collectivism without the inter- mediate stage of capitalism.50 Marx was so taken by this idea that he appropriated its figure of thought in almost all of its details. Alone in Europe, he claimed a few years later, the Russian community was still the predominant organic form of rural life throughout an immense empire. He continued:
In any case—with or without western capitalism’s fall from grace—the historical agenda featured the return of modern societies to the ‘archaic’ type of communal property, but in a superior form.52 As he maintained at the same time to refute Bakunin, Marx was still convinced that a radical social revolution is bound up with certain definite historical conditions of economic development.53 But he believed that Russia, thanks to a unique combination of circumstances—above all because of its contemporaneity with capitalist production54—could avoid the mistakes of the West. This transfer of modernity to the East could take place only if the Revolution was also victorious in the West. On the other hand, according to Marx’s vision, a revolution in Russia could inspire the West. Just as his depiction of czarism as the center of the European Reaction was always larger than life, so too would be the consequences of its collapse.55 “Russia, I believe, will play the most important part in the near future,” his friend Engels wrote during the Eastern Crisis at the beginning of 1878: Whatever the outcome of the war, the Russian revolution is ready and it will break out soon, perhaps this year; it will begin, contrary to Bakunin’s predictions, from above, in the palace, in the heart of the impoverished and frondeuse nobility. But once set in motion, it will sweep over the peasants, and you will then witness scenes in comparison with which those of ’93 will pall. Once Russia has been pushed into revolution, the whole face of Europe will change.56
In late August 1879, the executive committee of the revolu- tionary Russian secret organization Narodnaya Volya—“People’s Will”—sentenced Czar Alexander II to death for “crimes against the people.” On 1 March 1881, they blew him sky-high with a bomb as he rode along a scenic embankment in his carriage.59 Marx situated the terrorist central committee among those circles in Russia “where Capital is more read and appreciated than anywhere else,”60 but this was not the only reason he showed sympathy for the assassination. In his eyes, the larger-than-life magnitude of czarist despotism nec- essarily required extraordinary action, which no more lends itself to moralising—for or against—than does the earthquake in Chios. He char- acterized the Petersburg assassins as sterling chaps through and through, sans pose mélodramatique, simple, matter-of-fact, heroic.61 They had executed the will of the world. Marx was not the only one to render such judgments. Even the Social Democrat maintained that in a country where there prevailed a tyranny like that in Russia, even poison and daggers, revolvers and dynamite must be regarded as permitted means to put an end to blood-soaked despotism.62 Not even a staunch monarchist like Fy- odor Dostoevsky could bring himself to condemn the assassin Vera Zasulich, who in late January 1878 severely wounded the governor of St. Petersburg, General Trepov, with a shot from a revolver. Pun- ishing this woman, the author of Demons maintained, would be “in- appropriate and superfluous.” Zasulich was in fact acquitted by a jury court.63 She immigrated to Switzerland and in February 1881 turned inquisitively to Marx with her question about the future of the Russian village community. Those among the Russian emigrants who regarded these villages as having been sentenced to extinction “call themselves your disciples par excellence,” she wrote to him.64 Zasulich wanted his authentic opinion, and Marx replied that the analysis provided in Capital ad- mittedly included no evidence whatsoever either for or against the viability of the village community; however, having engaged in a special study of the matter that included the use of original sources, he had become convinced that this commune is the fulcrum of social regeneration in Russia.65 This was not necessarily the view of the Marx supporters in Swiss exile whom Zasulich referred to, meaning in the first instance Georgi Plekhanov. He advocated the view that Russia by no means occu- pied a special place in the world: in his homeland as in others, the path to socialism was by way of capitalism, and to that extent the old peasant communities were sentenced to extinction.66 Plekhanov held that a revolution that invoked socialism without fulfilling the necessary requirements would inevitably be a “political monster,” a “tsarist despotism disguised in communist colors.”67 In principle, this kind of prognosis made Plekhanov the more rigorous Marxist, comparatively speaking. In taking his position, Marx had in a certain sense even sided in favor of the romantic peasant socialism of the so-called ethnic tradi- tionalists of the Narodnaya Volya party,68 thus opening a viable path to the Bolshevist synthesis of the ethnic traditionalist movement and Marxism—which the social democrat Plekhanov decisively re- jected. “If the Russian Revolution becomes the signal for a proletar- ian revolution in the West, so that the two complement each other,” Marx wrote in the foreword to the second Russian edition of the Communist Manifesto, “the present Russian common ownership of land may serve as the starting point for communist development.”69 In this form, as Ernest Gellner once noted, Marxism appeared to be tailor-made for the Russian soul. It also resolved an apparently insurmountable Russian contradiction by reconciling the coercive tension between Russia’s westernizing tendencies and its mystical, messianic, and populist inclinations to produce a unified vision.70 It was during the period of the Anti-Socialist Laws that Marx was suddenly gripped by his old revolutionary fever. The sooner czarism collapsed, he maintained, the sooner Bismarck’s repressive policies would come to an end, and the wave of terror that beset Russia at the time seemed to herald its impending burial.71 Plekhanov had spoken out quite clearly against terrorism; the immediate result of the czar’s murder was the declaration of a state of emergency in many provinces in the Russian empire. It did not ignite a revolu- tion, if only because the population remained indifferent in light of the assassination, whereas the terror increasingly took on an aimless life of its own.72 Perhaps Marx was only infected by a brief flare-up of old-age radicalism, particularly since during the last years of his life his house increasingly became a meeting place for young Russian supporters and admirers. Not all of them were terrorists or revolu- tionaries; among them were people like Maxim Kovalevsky, a liberal opponent of czarism who after 1905 taught at Petersburg University and still, as an old man, considered Marx his beloved teacher. Also included was the young German Lopatin, who had vainly attempted to liberate Nikolay Chernyshevsky from his banishment in Siberia and had also, together with Nikolai Danielson, translated Capital into Russian. But above all it was Russians like Plekhanov, Axelrod, Lev Deutsch, and finally also Vera Zasulich who were the first to offi- cially call themselves “Marxists.”73 After Marx died on 14 March 1883, his burial in London’s Highgate Cemetery was attended by scarcely more than a dozen close acquaintances, among them Wil- helm Liebknecht. Engels gave the eulogy. In Russia, however, Marx’s death became a publicly recognized event. Students at the Petrovsky Agricultural Academy in Moscow sent a telegram expressly asking Engels to lay a wreath at his grave in their name.74 “The Russian socialists,” stated an address to the mourners from exiled groups in Paris, “bow before the grave of the man who sympathised with their strivings in all the fluctuations of their terrible struggle, a struggle which they shall continue until the final victory of the principles of the social revolution.”75 Much more so than in Germany and West- ern Europe, the doctrine of Marxism had gained a secure footing among the intelligentsia in Russia. Here, too, was where it underwent its most radical revision and consequential reformulation. In 1902, Lenin—an aristocratic lawyer from Simbirsk on the Volga, already a second-generation Marxist, whose real name was Vladimir Ulyanov—wrote the foundational Bolshevik text What Is to Be Done? It was no coincidence that he borrowed the title from the Chernyshevsky novel featuring the character of the professional revolutionary Rakhmetov. In this text, Lenin called for an avant-garde party consisting of professional revo- lutionaries that, like a military formation, was to function according to the principle of central discipline. On the one hand, here Lenin was operating within the framework of Russian ethnic traditional- ism, insofar as he reignited debate over an organizational model that Pyotr Tkachev, the first actual theoretician of the Russian revolu- tion, had called for as early as 1874.76 This was the pragmatic Rus- sian characteristic of his plan. On the other hand, however, he also sought a theoretical re- sponse to the Western European workers’ movement’s shift into so- called revisionism. Targeting a general problem in Marx’s doctrine, Lenin wrote: The history of all countries shows that the working class, exclusively by its own effort, is able to develop only trade union consciousness, i.e., it may itself realize the necessity for combining in unions, for fighting against the employers, and for striving to compel the govern- ment to pass necessary labor legislation, etc. The theory of social- ism, however, grew out of the philosophic, historical, and economic theories that were elaborated by the educated representatives of the propertied classes, the intellectuals.77 Consequently, according to Lenin, political class consciousness could be brought to the workers “only from without”78—through the political mission of his envisioned organization of professional revolutionaries. Basically, he thereby said that the real movement that had always been held aloft by Marx inevitably had to undergo the reformist developments observable in Western European social democracy. Conversely, if one wanted to retain the original goals of communism, one had to decide against the real movement. Lenin corrected Marx by pulling the rug out from under his historical materialism. The dilemma itself, however, was the result of a fundamental mistake by Marx. In 1845 he had written, and basically never ques- tioned, the following: It is not a question of what this or that proletarian, or even the whole proletariat, at the moment regards as its aim. It is a question of what the proletariat is, and what, in accordance with this being, it will his- torically be compelled to do. Its aim and historical action is visibly and irrevocably foreshadowed in its own life situation as well as in the whole organisation of bourgeois society today.79 As Heinrich August Winkler once noted, Marx had succumbed to a historical fallacy when he tried to envision the future history of the modern proletariat in the role of a new universal class accord- ing to the model of the French Revolution of 1789.80 The prole- tariat was—in contrast to its existence as a metaphysical assumption that was based on nothing—a sociological fact of modernity, not a world-historical class that could take the impulse of the storming of the Bastille to a higher level. Without openly saying so, Lenin saw things this way as well and thus had to either accept this fact or create a surrogate. Notoriously, he decided for the latter. Like a medieval order of knights, the Bolshevik party was to assert through violence this principle that had no equivalent in real historical de- velopment and civil life. The results are well known. The rape of the earth led to the uto- pia of purges described by Gerd Koenen81 and the domination of the surreal analyzed by Martin Malia,82 which silently came to an end in autumn 1989. In the meantime the associated megalomania of the ability to create history claimed millions of victims. Are these to be blamed on Marx? Yes and no. Whoever stood by his conviction that communism was the necessary result of history then needed to pro- duce it through violence, if Marx’s prognoses proved unrealistic. In the end, the communist experiment failed due to a lack of the pro- fane,83 to a quasi-religious overloading of all real spheres of life. This fatal tendency, however, was already embedded in the materialistic eschatology of Marx’s early writings. The landmark events of 1989 made it a profane year: human interests triumphed over what had long ago become an infirm, spiritless industrial variant of belief and redemption, and they did so without facing any resistance worth mentioning, running through doors that the Communist state pow- ers had left open toward a freedom that had within seconds sud- denly become possible. A clearer refutation of Marx’s fundamental fallacies can hardly be imagined. However, this applies primarily to the political and historical-theological Marx. For the same reason, during the Cold War Marx, as a theoreti- cian of capitalism and historical evolution, had resided in a political ghetto; thus, with all of his fragmentary insights and contradictions, he remains to be discovered through impartial inquiry. It would be best, Richard Rorty once noted, if a higher knowledge of the forces that guide history were attainable without prophecies and demands. But even if today Marx seems somewhat dated in many respects, he formulated—in a manner that is still admirable—an important les- son learned in light of untrammeled industrial capitalism: the over- throw of authoritarian regimes and the creation of constitutional democracies is not enough to ensure equality and decency among human beings.84 What concerns us today—more so than his apocalyptic answers, attributable to the restless zeitgeist of the nineteenth century—are rather Marx’s still-vexatious questions, through which he contem- plated the unstable circumstances and self-destructive tendencies of our modern world. We have learned to mistrust prophesies, even those that, after the silent disappearance of communism, once again rashly predicted the end of history and have since been overthrown by the very spirits who proclaimed them. Notes
vol. 35, 17.
MECW, vol. 24, 95f.
vol. 27, 92f.
vol. 25, 125, 23, 131.
vol. 26, 397.
(Stuttgart, 1995), 45.
78. Ibid., 112.
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