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The Marxist View of Russian Society and Revolution

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 July 2011

Karl A. Wittfogel
Karl A. Wittfogel
Affiliation:
University of Washington
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Extract

“The victory of communism is inevitable.” This claim has been made since the consolidation of the Soviet Union, and it has been restated with relish by the Kremlin's supreme spokesman during his recent visits abroad. It rests on the argument that Russian society, in accordance with the Marxist-Leninist doctrine, has advanced from feudalism to capitalism and socialism, blazing a trail along which all other countries are bound to go. Thus the superiority of the Communist regime is asserted not merely on the basis of operational successes, but with reference to historical considerations which are ascribed to the “classics” of communism, and ultimately to Marx and Engels.

Type
Research Article
Information
World Politics , Volume 12 , Issue 4 , July 1960 , pp. 487 - 508
Copyright
Copyright © Trustees of Princeton University 1960

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References

1 Marx used this formula to characterize what he considered the stimulating confusion in the ideas of Ricardo (Marx, Karl, Theorien über den Mehrwert, 3 vols., Stuttgart, 1921, in, p. 94).Google Scholar

2 See Wittfogel, Karl A., Oriental Despotism: A Comparative Study of Total Power, New Haven, Conn., 1957, pp. 372ft.Google Scholar (hereafter cited as Wittfogel 1957).

3 Engels saw the classes of medieval Europe emerge not from the “swamp” of the decaying slaveholding society of antiquity, but from a barbarian tribal “gens” society, which, avoiding any elaborate system of slavery, advanced directly toward medieval society wim its relatively mild form of servitude (Engels, Friedrich, Der Ursprung der Familie, des Privateigenthums und des Staats, Stuttgart, 1921, pp. 160–62).Google Scholar See also Marx, Karl, Grundrisse der Kritik der Politischen Qkonomie, Berlin, 1953, pp. 382LGoogle Scholar (hereafter cited as Marx 1953); cf. Wittfogel, 1957, p. 416Google Scholar, note d.

4 In 1846 Engels praised this sequence as far superior to Hegel's four Weltreiche, “to say nothing of the post-Hegelian constructs” (Marx, Karl and Engels, Friedrich, Historisch-Kritische Gesamtausgabe, Werke-Schriften-Briefe, Marx-Engels-[Lenin] Institute, Berlin-Moscow, 1927, 1, 4, p. 450Google Scholar [hereafter cited as MEGA]; cf. also p. 413). For instances of Marx's and Engels' use of Fourier's categories, see Wittfogel, 1957, p. 385Google Scholar, note d.

5 MEGA, 1, 7, p. 302.

6 Ibid., p. 342.

7 Ibid., pp. 302f.

8 Aus dem literarischen Nachlass von Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels und Ferdinand Lasalle, ed. by Mehring, Franz, 4 vols., Stuttgart, 1902, 11, p. 231.Google Scholar

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10 Ibid., p. 250.

11 MEGA, III, 1, p. 206. For Engels, Russia's civilizing quality was due largely to its “more developed bourgeois elements” (ibid., p. 207).

12 Cf. Engels, Karl Marx-Friedrich, Revolution und Konterrevolution in Deutschland, Berlin, 1953, p. 81.Google Scholar This series of articles, which appeared in the New York Daily Tribune from September 1851 to December 1852 under the name of Marx, was actually written by Engels (MEGA, in, 1, pp. 241f., 244, 259f., and passim). The above-cited juxtaposition of the “civilized West” and the “barbarian East” was dated February 1852.

13 See Wittfogel, 1957, p. 373Google Scholar, note b.

14 MEGA, III, 1, pp. 169, 177, 180, 184.

15 Engels, who was then living in Manchester, and Marx, who was living in London, met frequently and sometimes were together for weeks at a time: ca. November 5–15, 1851; December 20, 1851, to January 4, 1852; April 11–13, 1852; ca. May 26 to June 26, 1852; ca. December 23, 1852, to January 10, 1853; and ca. April 30 to May 16, 1853 (Karl Marx Chronic seines Lebens in Einzeldaten, Marx-Engels-Lenin, Institute, Moscow, 1934, pp. 114–39Google Scholar [hereafter cited as KMCL]).

16 The article was sent to the New York Daily Tribune by Marx, but again was written by Engels (Marx, Karl and Engels, Friedrich, Gesammelte Schrijten 1852 bis 1862, ed. by Rjasanoff, N., 2 vols., Stuttgart, 1920, 1, p. 475Google Scholar [hereafter cited as Marx and Engels 1920]).

17 New York, Daily Tribune, April 21, 1853.

18 Engels', letter of May (ca. 18th) 1853 (MEGA, III, 1, pp. 471f.).Google Scholar

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20 Ibid., p. 480; italics added.

21 Ibid. Engels'; argument suggests his familiarity with the pertinent ideas of at least one classical economist, Richard Jones, whom Marx had studied as early as June 1851 (KMCL, p. 107). In a pioneer work on Asiatic society written in 1831, Jones pointed to the significance of “that great tract of sandy desert” that stretches across the “old world.” His list of these desert areas begins with the Sahara, Egypt, Syria, Persia, India, and ends with “Tartary” and northernmost China. It concludes with the sentence: “This soil can be made fruitful only by irrigation” (Jones, Richard, An Essay on the Distribution of Wealth, and on the Sources of Taxation, London, 1831, pp. 119ff.).Google Scholar

22 New York Daily Tribune, June 25, 1853; italics added.

23 MEGA, III, 1, p. 486; italics in original.

24 Ibid., p. 487; italics added.

25 Ibid.

26 New York Daily Tribune, August 5, 1853.

27 Ibid., August 8, 1853.

28 Marx's, article was published in the New York Daily Tribune, September 9, 1854 (Marx and Engels 1920, 11, p. 417).Google Scholar This politically irrelevant form of self-government, which is typical of Oriental society, I have called a “Beggars’ Democracy” (Wittfogel, 1957, pp. 125f).Google Scholar

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31 Cf. KMCL, p. 159.

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33 This is the case in the first edition (1923–1948) and in the second (1955–1958). Cf. also Rubel, Maximilien, Bibliographie des Oeuvres de Karl Marx, Paris, 1956, p. 131.Google Scholar

34 The Free Press, April 1, 1857.

35 Marx used this term as connoting not the private slavery of antiquity, but a system nof state-imposed political slavery. In 1857–1858 in the first draft of Das Kapital, he referred to the traditional Eastern pattern of subordination as “the general slavery of the Orient” (Marx, 1953, p. 395Google Scholar; cf. Wittfogel, 1957, p. 377).Google Scholar

36 The Free Press, February 4, 1857.

37 Ibid., February 4 and 18, 1857.

38 Ibid., February 25 and April 1, 1857.

39 Ibid., February 25, 1857.

40 For mis concept and its application to Russia, see Wittfogel, 1957, pp. 173ff., 219ff.Google Scholar

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42 Because of the growing interest in Russia's Orientalization, I have elaborated this point in the third printing of Oriental Despotism (New Haven, Conn., 1959), p. 220, note y-bis.

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45 See Engels, Friedrich, Herrn Eugen Diihrings Umwalzung der Wissenschajt. Dialektik der Natur, 1873–1882, Moscow, 1935, p. 9.Google Scholar

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48 Marx-Engels Archiv, Zeitschrift de Marx-Engels-Instituts, ed. by Rjazanov, D., 1, Frankfurt, 1927, pp. 324, 333.Google Scholar

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58 In 1889 a resume and excerpts were published by N. Ziber in the magazine Slovo. A full translation by V. J. Yakovenko appeared in 1904.

59 Trush, M., “Lenin's Abstract of Marx's and Engels'; Correspondence,” Kommunist (Moscow), No. 2 (1960), p. 50Google Scholar; italics in original. Professor Leonard Schapiro of London kindly drew my attention to this passage, which shows that Lenin, if he was not familiar with it earlier, at least by 1913 knew Marx's most precise formulation concerning the managerial functions of the Asiatic state (see Wittfogel, 1957, p. 389).Google Scholar

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63 Ibid., p. 14.

64 Plekhanov, in Protokoly Obydinitelnago Syezda Rossyskoi Sotsialdemokraticheskoi Rabochei Partii (Protocols of the Unification Congress of the R.S.D.R.P, held in Stockholm in 1906), Moscow, 1907, p. 116Google Scholar (hereafter cited as Protocols).

65 Plekhanov, 1906, p. 14.Google Scholar

66 According to Plekhanov (ibid., p. 12), these conditions were increasingly undermined in nineteenth-century Russia.

67 Ibid., p. 17.

68 Protocols, p. 90.

69 Parvus called “the Russian state system … an Asiatic kind of absolutism supported by an army of the European type” (Parvus, , “War and Revolution, II: The Fall of Autocracy,” Isbra, No. 61, March 5, 1904).Google Scholar

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72 Ibid., p. 19.

73 Lenin, W. I., Sämtliche Werke, Wien-Berlin (later Moscow-Leningrad) 25 vols., IV, 1, p. 74Google Scholar, cf. pp. 14, 65, 197, 212; IV, 2, pp. 16, 67, 155f. (hereafter cited as Lenin, SWG).

74 Ibid., IV, 1, p. 212. In this and many other instances, the Comintern translators mislead the reader by frequently rendering krepostnichestvo as “feudalism,” instead of “bondage” or “serfdom” (cf. Wittfogel, 1957, pp. 378LGoogle Scholar and note i).

75 Lenin, , SWG, 1, 1, p. 14Google Scholar; IV, 2, pp. 155f.

76 Ibid., IV, 2, p. 149, note.

77 Ibid., V, p. 32.

78 Wittfogel, 1957, pp. 394f.Google Scholar

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84 Engels, 1894, p. 67Google Scholar; cf. also Engels', “The Foreign Policy of Russian Czarism” (1890), in Marx, Karl and Engels, Friedrich, The Russian Menace to Europe, Glencoe, Ill., 1952, p. 51.Google Scholar

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89 Marx's letter to Sorge, September 27, 1877 (Marx-Engels, 1953, p. 363)Google Scholar; Marx's letter to Engels, , September 24, 1878 (MEGA, III, 4, p. 484).Google Scholar

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91 Engels, 1894, p. 72.Google Scholar

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95 Ibid., p. 145.

96 Ibid., p. 3.

97 Ibid., pp. 3f.

98 Ibid., p. 35; cf. pp. 29, 44.

99 Ibid., pp. 20ff.

100 Marx, and Engels, 1958, 11, pp. 18f. and 25.Google Scholar

101 Marcuse, 1958, pp. 7, 27ff.Google Scholar

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104 See piekhanov's Preface to Engels' “Soziales aus Russland” (Plekhanov, , Sochinenia, IX, p. 32)Google Scholar; cf. also Lenin, , SW, 1, pp. 371ff. (1897)Google Scholar, p. 396 (1899).

105 For the details of this development, see Wolfe, 1948, pp. 148ff.Google Scholar

106 Lenin, , SWG, IV, 2, pp. 159fGoogle Scholar; 170, 250ff.

107 Ibid., IV, 2, pp. 155f.

108 Ibid., VIII, p. 382; cf. pp. 81, 110f., 466.

109 Ibid., VIII, p. 573.

110 Ibid., IV, 2, pp. 264, 267, 280, 284f.; VI, p. 24.

111 Ibid., VI, pp. 380f., 412f., 416, 418, 423, 427.

112 Ibid., VII, p. 249.

113 Lenin, , S, x, p. 58.Google Scholar

114 Ibid., X, p. 75.

115 Trotsky, Leon, Stalin, ed. and tr. by Malamuth, Charles, New York and London, 1951, p. 430Google Scholar (hereafter cited as Trotsky 1941). According to Trotsky, die preface to Trotsky's pamphlet “Until die Ninth of January,” in which Parvus expressed these ideas, “entered permanently into the history of the Russian Revolution” (ibid., pp. 429f). Cf. Lenin's, respectful reference to this preface in April 1905Google Scholar (Lenin, , SWG, VII, p. 265).Google Scholar

116 parvus, “Preface to Trotsky's ‘Until the Ninth of January,’” dated München, January 31, 1905 (Trotsky, N., Do deviatavo yanvarya, Geneva, 1905), pp. VIf.Google Scholar; cf. Trotsky, 1941, pp. 430f.Google Scholar

117 Trotsky, 1923, p. 38.Google Scholar

118 Ibid., p. 231.

119 Ibid.

120 Lenin, , SWG, VIII, p. 80.Google Scholar

121 Protocols, p. 116.

122 Ibid., p. 45.

123 Ibid. See Wolfe, 1948, pp. 365f.Google Scholar; Wittfogel, 1957, pp. 392ff.Google Scholar

124 For an analysis of Lenin's erratic argument, see Wittfogel, 1957, pp. 391–94.Google Scholar

125 Lenin, , SW, III, p. 240.Google Scholar

126 Ibid., p. 260.

127 Ibid., p. 238.

128 Lenin's 1906 rejection of the bureaucracy probably also included the police. In 1916–1917, without referring to his earlier argument on the restoration but in conformity with Marx's 1871 comment on the Paris Commune, Lenin expressly listed the police among the institutions that should not be present in the aimed-for revolutionary state. While Lenin's proposals for establishing popular control over the state were as unrealistic as were those of Marx and Engels, they did underline the critical importance of popular control. In 1876–1878 Engels emphasized this point in his Anti-Diihring, which Marx read before its publication: the ineffectively controlled government, instead of being the “servant” of society, becomes its “master” (Engels, 1935, p. 183).Google Scholar

129 Lenin, , SWG, XXI, p. 468Google Scholar; SW, VII, p. 8.

130 Lenin, , SW, XI, p. 646.Google Scholar

131 Diskussia ob Aziatskom Sposobe Proizvodstva (Discussion of the Asiatic Mode of Production), Moscow and Leningrad, 1931, p. 89.

132 Stalin, J., Problems of Leninism, Moscow, 1953, p. 745.Google Scholar

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134 According to Trotsky, the Soviet bureaucracy, being neither homogeneous nor secure, was not yet a ruling class (Trotsky, Leon, The Revolution Betrayed, New York, 1937, pp. 139f.).Google Scholar After having temporarily played a progressive role (ibid., p. 275), it became increasingly reactionary (The Case of Leon Trotsky: Report of Hearings on the Charges Made Against Him in the Moscow Trials, by the Preliminary Commission of Inquiry, New York, 1937, p. 440). Deutscher follows Trotsky part of the way in maintaining that the Soviet bureaucracy, being neither unified nor secure, was only a “privileged and ruling minority” (Deutscher, Isaac, Heretics and Renegades, London, 1955, p. 203)Google Scholar, but he insists that its special privileges “coincided with a broader national interest” (ibid., p. 204). “The primitive magic of Stalinism,” he writes, despite its nauseating features, had a definitely progressive function (ibid., pp. 213f.); and “the economic progress made during the Stalin era” should make possible “a gradual democratic evolution” (Deutscher, Isaac, Russia: What Next?, New York, 1953, p. 221).Google Scholar

135 Marcuse uses his own type of dialectical argument; yet his conclusions closely approach those of the Neo-Trotskyites. He calls the Soviet bureaucracy “a separate class,” but avoids calling it a ruling class—it is neither homogeneous nor secure (Marcuse, 1958, p. III)Google Scholar and it “represents the social interest in a hypostatized form” (ibid., p. 118). Soviet theory has a “magic” quality; it thus assumes “a new rationality” (ibid., p. 90); eventually “technical progress will overtake the repressive restrictions imposed at earlier stages” (ibid., p. 188).

136 See Wittfogel, 1957, p. 440.Google Scholar Cf. also idem, “A Stronger Oriental Despotism” (the editors'; title; I would have preferred “Beyond Oriental Despotism”), China Quarterly I, No. 1 (January-March 1960), pp. 29ff.

137 Lenin's argument runs as follows: “Socialism is better than capitalism, but capitalism is better than medievalism, small production, and a bureaucracy connected with the dispersed character of the small producers” (Lenin, , S, XXXII, p. 329Google Scholar; italics added). The economic root of this bureaucracy was “the fragmented and dispersed character of small production, its poverty, lack of culture, absence of roads, illiteracy, absence of exchange between agriculture and industry, the absence of connection and interaction between them” (Lenin, , SW, IX, pp. 187f.Google Scholar; italics in original).

138 In his last book, Trotsky still spoke of the Russian peasantry as “dispersed over the surface of an immense country”; and after a description of the futile character of the peasant revolutions in old China, which represented nothing but “hopeless rotations” in an unchanging society, he concluded: “Such was the basis of ancient Asiatic, including ancient Russian, history” (Trotsky, 1941, p. 425).Google Scholar But when he referred to Lenin's thesis that without the aid of the proletarian revolution in the West restoration was unavoidable in Russia, he added: “He was not mistaken: the Stalinist bureaucracy is nothing else than the first stage of bourgeois restoration” (ibid., p. 429; italics added).