Teodor Shanin - Late Marx and the Russian Road: Marx and ‘the peripheries of capitalism’

Books ideally speak for themselves. A lengthy explanation of contents may deflect attention from the books goal, especially so, in a volume which includes also papers of interpretation. This introduction will be brief.

The mid-part of the book is mainly given to the drafts of Marxs 1881 discussion concerning rural Russia and some supplementary materials. The iconoclastic nature of this extraordinary piece of thinking aloud as against Marxs earlier views and later interpretations, the peculiar history of those drafts, the relevance of them for the so-called developing societies of today, make these papers into one of the most important intellectual finds of the century. Their first full and direct translation into English should enable the readers to judge for themselves the extent to which Marxs magnificent originality, foresight and heretical lan stayed with him to the very end. Bureaucrats and theologians of science in whichever camp will not like it. Good!

The books first part offers some interpretations of Marxs work at the last stage of its development, relating directly to the drafts published. It is polemical and not of one cloth in such matters critical doubt and debate are essential. It was Marx who chose as his favourite motto De omnibus dubitandum doubt everything and the drafts below offer living proof of how much he was true to this principle. A way to honour his scholarship is to follow him in that.

The final part three of the book presents some materials which come to trace the intellectual bridges between Marxs writings on Russia and the Russian revolutionary tradition. It begins with extracts from those writings of Chernyshevskii which influenced particularly and explicitly Marxs own work. It then places before Western audiences, for once verbatim, the major programmatic and analytical statements of the Peoples Will the Russian indigenous revolutionary organisation of Marxs own time, and a group to which Marx and Engels have consistently referred till the end as our friends. The whole movement is remembered for its heroic defiance and bombings, which seem to have obscured its achievements in the realm of theory, namely, an alternative and highly original view of society, state and revolution within the specific social context they operated in. Also, their writings offer insight into analysis which merged, rarely acknowledged, into the thought of late Marx as well as that of Lenin. Looking at the subsequent century, one is struck by the contemporary potence of many of those statements. It is as if the global history and human society were only now catching up with many of the revolutionary considerations and illuminations of the 1880s, both those of the Peoples Will and Marxs own. A discussion of interdependence between Marxs analysis and the vernacular revolutionary tradition concludes both the section and the book while forming a link with the consideration of the socialisms of the twentieth century.

Even on first perusal of the book, the reader should keep in mind its assumption that the Russia of those times was a developing or peripheral capitalist society, in the sense attached to those terms today arguably the first of its type. It is only in that light that the papers presented by Marx can be considered in their full contemporary relevance. In the same light one can see the fuller significance of Marxs declared wish to use Russia for the Volume III of Capital the way he used England in Capital, Volume I. Also, there are clearly different conceptions of Marxism, one of which sees itself as consistent deduction from Capital, Volume I using whichever empirical evidence is handy to defend its absoluteness and its universality. The text which follows should help to transform Marxs comment of the 1870s about himself not being a Marxist from a sly anecdote into a major illumination of Marxs own Marxism as against that of the first generation of his interpreters.

For the rest, the book will speak for itself.