The final battle came towards the end of summer 1872. After the terrible events of the previous three years – the Franco-Prussian War, the wave of repression following the Paris Commune, the numerous internal skirmishes – the International could at last meet again in congress. In the countries where it had recently sunk roots, it was expanding through the enthusiastic efforts of union leaders and worker-activists suddenly fired by its slogans: it was in 1872 that the organization experienced its fastest growth in Italy, Denmark, Portugal and the Netherlands, at the very time when it was banned in France, Germany and the Austro-Hunarian Empire. Yet most of the membership remained unaware of the gravity of the conflicts that raged on within its leading group.1
The Fifth Congress of the International took place in The Hague between 2 and 7 September. The crucial importance of the event impelled Marx to attend in person, accompanied by Engels. In a letter to Kugelmann, he noted that it had been ‘a matter of life and death for the International; and before I resign I want at least to protect it from disintegrating elements’.2 In fact, it was the only congress of the organization in which he took part.
Neither César De Paepe – perhaps aware that he would be unable to play the same mediating role as in London the previous year3 – nor Bakunin made it to the Dutch capital.
By an irony of fate, the congress unfolded in Concordia Hall, although concord was little in evidence there; all the sessions were marked by irreducible antagonism between the two camps, resulting in debates that were far poorer than at the two previous congresses.
Approval of The Hague Congress resolutions was possible only because of its distorted composition. Though spurious and in many respects held together by instrumental purposes, the coalition of delegates that was in the minority at the congress actually constituted the most numerous part of the International.4
The most important decision taken by Marx at The Hague was to incorporate Resolution IX of the 1871 London Conference into the statutes of the Association, as a new article, 7a. Whereas the Provisional Statutes of 1864 had stated that ‘the economic emancipation of the working class is the great end to which every political movement ought to be subordinate as a means’, this insertion mirrored the new relationship of forces within the organization. Political struggle was now the necessary instrument for the transformation of society since: ‘the lords of land and the lords of capital will always use their political privileges for the defence and perpetuation of their economic monopolies, and for the enslavement of labour. The conquest of political power has therefore become the great duty of the working class.’5
The International was now very different from how it had been at the time of its foundation: the radical-democratic components had walked out after being increasingly marginalized; the mutualists had been defeated and many converted; reformists no longer constituted the bulk of the organization (except in Britain); and anticapitalism had become the political line of the whole Association, as well as of recently formed tendencies such as the anarcho-collectivists. Moreover, although the years of the International had witnessed a degree of economic prosperity that in some cases made conditions less parlous, the workers understood that real change would come not through such palliatives but only through the end of human exploitation. They were also basing their struggles more and more on their own material needs, rather than the initiatives of particular groups to which they belonged.
The wider picture, too, was radically different. The unification of Germany in 1871 confirmed the onset of a new age in which the nation-state would be the central form of political, legal and territorial identity; this placed a question mark over any supranational body that required its members to surrender a sizeable share of their political leadership. At the same time, the growing differences between national movements and organizations made it extremely difficult for the General Council to produce a political synthesis capable of satisfying the demands of all.
The initial configuration of the International had thus become outmoded, just as its original mission had come to an end. The task was no longer to prepare for and organize Europe-wide support for strikes, nor to call congresses on the usefulness of trade unions or the need to socialize the land and the means of production. Such themes were now part of the collective heritage of the organization as a whole. After the Paris Commune, the real challenge for the workers’ movement was a revolutionary one: how to organize in such a way as to end the capitalist mode of production and to overthrow the institutions of the bourgeois world. It was no longer a question of how to reform the existing society, but how to build a new one.6 For this new advance in the class struggle, Marx thought it indispensable to build working-class political parties in each country. The document ‘To the Federal Council of the Spanish Region of the International Working Men’s Association’, written by Engels in February 1871, was one of the most explicit statements of the General Council on this matter:
Experience has shown everywhere that the best way to emancipate the workers from this domination of the old parties is to form in each country a proletarian party with a policy of its own, a policy which is manifestly different from that of the other parties, because it must express the conditions necessary for the emancipation of the working class. This policy may vary in details according to the specific circumstances of each country; but as the fundamental relations between labour and capital are the same everywhere and the political domination of the possessing classes over the exploited classes is an existing fact everywhere, the principles and aims of proletarian policy will be identical, at least in all western countries. […] To give up fighting our adversaries in the political field would mean to abandon one of the most powerful weapons, particularly in the sphere of organization and propaganda.7
From this point on, therefore, the party was considered essential for the struggle of the proletariat: it had to be independent of all existing political forces and to be built, both programmatically and organizationally, in accordance with the national context. At the General Council session of 23 July 1872, Marx criticized not only the abstentionists – who had been attacking Resolution IX of the London Conference – but the equally dangerous position of ‘the working classes of England and America’, ‘who let the middle classes use them for political purposes’.8 On the second point, he had already declared at the London Conference that ‘politics must be adapted to the conditions of all countries’,9 and the following year, in a speech in Amsterdam immediately after The Hague Congress, he stressed:
Someday the worker must seize political power in order to build up the new organization of labour; he must overthrow the old politics, which sustain the old institutions, if he is not to lose Heaven on Earth, like the old Christians who neglected and despised politics. But we have not asserted that the ways to achieve that goal are everywhere the same. […] We do not deny that there are countries […] where the workers can attain their goal by peaceful means. This being the case, we must also recognize the fact that in most countries on the Continent the lever of our revolution must be force; it is force to which we must some day appeal in order to erect the rule of labour.10
Thus, although the workers’ parties emerged in different forms in different countries, they should not subordinate themselves to national interests.11 The struggle for socialism could not be confined in that way, and especially in the new historical context internationalism must continue to be the guiding beacon for the proletariat, as well as its vaccine against the deadly embrace of the state and the capitalist system.
During The Hague Congress, harsh polemics preceded a series of votes. Following the adoption of article 7a, the goal of winning political power was inscribed in the statutes, and there was also an indication that a workers’ party was an essential instrument for this. The subsequent decision to confer broader powers on the General Council made the situation even more intolerable for the minority, since the Council now had the task of ensuring ‘rigid observation of the principles and statutes and general rules of the International’, and ‘the right to suspend branches, sections, councils or federal committees and federations of the International until the next congress’.12
For the first time in the history of the International, its highest congress also approved expulsions. Those of Bakunin and Guillaume caused quite a stir, having been proposed by a commission of enquiry that described the Alliance for Socialist Democracy as ‘a secret organization with statutes completely opposite to those of the International’.13 Finally, the congress authorized publication of a long report, The Alliance for Socialist Democracy and the International Working Men’s Association (1873), which traced the history of the organization led by Bakunin and analysed its public and secret activity country by country. Written by Engels, Lafargue and Marx, the document was published in French in July 1873 and contains an extensive critique of Bakunin’s ‘revolutionary revolutionism’. The three authors argue that, for Bakunin, political power will be destroyed not by combating ‘existing states and governments with the means employed by ordinary revolutionaries, but on the contrary to hurl resounding, grandiloquent phrases’.14 Bakunin’s objective was not to overthrow ‘the Bonapartist State, the Prussian or Russian State […], but an abstract state, the state as such, a state that nowhere exists’.15
The opposition at the congress was not uniform in its response to these attacks, some abstaining and others voting against. On the final day, however, a joint declaration read out by the worker Victor Dave [1845–1922] from The Hague section stated:
1. We the […] supporters of the autonomy and federation of groups of working men shall continue our administrative relations with the General Council […].
2. The federations which we represent will establish direct and permanent relations between themselves and all regular branches of the Association. […].
4. We call on all the federations and sections to prepare between now and the next general congress for the triumph within the International of the principles of federative autonomy as the basis of the organization of labour.16
This statement was more a tactical ploy, designed to avoid responsibility for a split that by then seemed inevitable, rather than a serious political undertaking to relaunch the organization. In this sense, it was similar to the proposals of the ‘centralists’ to augment the powers of the General Council, at a time when they were already planning a far more drastic alternative.
For what took place in the morning session on 6 September – the most dramatic of the congress – was the final act of the International as it had been conceived and constructed over the years. Engels stood up to speak and, to the astonishment of those present, proposed that ‘the seat of the General Council [should] be transferred to New York for the year 1872–1873, and that it should be formed by members of the American federal council’.17 Thus, Marx and other ‘founders’ of the International would no longer be part of its central body, which would consist of people whose very names were unknown – Engels proposed seven, with the option to increase the total to a maximum of fifteen. The delegate Maltman Barry [1842–1909], a General Council member who supported Marx’s positions, described better than anyone the reaction from the floor: ‘Consternation and discomfiture stood plainly written on the faces of the party of dissension as [Engels] uttered the last words. […] It was sometime before anyone rose to speak. It was a coup d’état, and each looked to his neighbour to break the spell.’18 Engels argued that ‘inter-group conflicts in London had reached such a pitch that [the General Council] had to be transferred elsewhere’,19 and that New York was the best choice in times of repression. But the Blanquists were violently opposed to the move, on the grounds that ‘the International should first of all be the permanent insurrectionary organization of the proletariat’20 and that ‘when a party unites for struggle […] its action is all the greater, the more its leadership committee is active, well armed and powerful’. Vaillant and other followers of Blanqui present at The Hague thus felt betrayed when they saw ‘the head’ being shipped ‘to the other side of the Atlantic [while] the armed body was fighting in [Europe]’.21 Realizing that it would no longer be possible to exercise control over the General Council, they left the congress and shortly afterwards the International.
Many even in the ranks of the majority voted against the move to New York as tantamount to the end of the International as an operational structure. The decision, approved by only three votes (twenty-six for, twenty-three against), eventually depended on nine abstentions and the fact that some members of the minority were happy to see the General Council relocated far from their own centres of activity.
Another factor in the move was certainly Marx’s view that it was better to give up the International than to see it end up as a sectarian organization in the hands of his opponents. The demise of the International, which would certainly follow the transfer of the General Council to New York, was infinitely preferable to a long and wasteful succession of fratricidal struggles.
Opposition to sectarian groups and to the reduction of the workers’ movement to numerically insubstantial party churches was a constant feature of Marx’s political thinking in this period. In The Alleged Splits in the International (1872), which he wrote together with Engels, he asserted:
The first phase of the proletariat’s struggle against the bourgeoisie is marked by a sectarian movement. That is logical at a time when the proletariat has not yet developed sufficiently to act as a class. Certain thinkers criticize social antagonisms and suggest fantastic solutions thereof, which the mass of workers is left to accept, preach, and put into practice. The sects formed by these initiators are abstentionist by their very nature – i.e., alien to all real action, politics, strikes, coalitions, or, in a word, to any united movement. The mass of the proletariat always remains indifferent or even hostile to their propaganda. The Paris and Lyon workers did not want the St.-Simonists, the Fourierists, the Icarians, any more than the Chartists and the English trade unionists wanted the Owenites. These sects act as levers of the movement in the beginning, but become an obstruction as soon as the movement outgrows them; after which they became reactionary. Witness the sects in France and England, and lately the Lassalleans in Germany, who after having hindered the proletariat’s organization for several years ended up becoming simple instruments of the police. To sum up, we have here the infancy of the proletarian movement, just as astrology and alchemy are the infancy of science. If the International were to be founded, it was necessary that the proletariat go through this phase.
In contrast to ‘sectarian organizations, with their vagaries and rivalries’, Marx argued that the International should be a
genuine and militant organization of the proletarian class of all countries, united in their common struggle against the capitalists and the landowners, against their class power organized in the state. The International’s Rules, therefore, speak of only simple ‘workers’ societies’, all aiming for the same goal and accepting the same program, which presents a general outline of the proletarian movement, while having its theoretical elaboration to be guided by the needs of the practical struggle and the exchange of ideas in the sections, unrestrictedly admitting all shades of socialist convictions in their organs and Congresses.22
Still, it is not convincing to argue – as many have done23 – that the key reason for the decline of the International was the conflict between its two currents, or even between two men – Marx and Bakunin – however great their stature. Rather, it was the changes taking place in the world around it that rendered the International obsolete. The growth and transformation of the organizations of the workers’ movement, the strengthening of the nation-state as a result of Italian and German unification, the expansion of the International in countries like Spain and Italy (where the economic and social conditions were very different from those in Britain or France), the drift towards even greater moderation in the British trade union movement, the repression following the Paris Commune: all these factors together made the original configuration of the International inappropriate to the new times.
Against this backdrop, with its prevalence of centrifugal trends, developments in the life of the International and its main protagonists naturally also played a role. The London Conference, for instance, was far from the saving event that Marx had hoped it would be; indeed, its rigid conduct significantly aggravated the internal crisis, by failing to take account of the prevailing moods or to display the foresight needed to avoid the strengthening of Bakunin and his group.24 It proved a Pyrrhic victory for Marx – one which, in attempting to resolve internal conflicts, ended up accentuating them. It remains the case, however, that the decisions taken in London only speeded up a process that was already under way and impossible to reverse.
In addition to all these historical and organizational considerations, there were others of no lesser weight regarding the chief protagonist. As Marx had reminded delegates at a session of the London Conference in 1871, ‘the work of the Council had become immense, obliged as it was to tackle both general questions and national questions’.25 It was no longer the tiny organization of 1864 walking on an English and a French leg; it was now present in all European countries, each with its particular problems and characteristics. Not only was the organization everywhere wracked by internal conflicts, but the arrival of the Communard exiles in London, with new preoccupations and a variegated baggage of ideas, made it still more arduous for the General Council to perform its task of political synthesis.
Marx was sorely tried after eight years of intense activity for the International.26 Aware that the workers’ forces were on the retreat following the defeat of the Paris Commune – the most important fact of the moment for him – he therefore resolved to devote the years ahead to the attempt to complete Capital. When he crossed the North Sea to the Netherlands, he must have felt that the battle awaiting him would be his last major one as a direct protagonist.
From the mute figure he had cut at that first meeting in St. Martin’s Hall in 1864, he had become recognized as the leader of the International not only by congress delegates and the General Council but also by the wider public. Thus, although the International certainly owed a very great deal to Marx, it had also done much to change his life. Before its foundation, he had been known only in small circles of political activists. Later, and above all after the Paris Commune – as well as the publication of his magnum opus in 1867, of course – his fame spread among revolutionaries in many European countries, to the point where the press referred to him as the ‘red terror doctor’. The responsibility deriving from his role in the International – which allowed him to experience up close so many economic and political struggles – was a further stimulus for his reflections on communism and profoundly enriched the whole of his anticapitalist theory.
The battle between the two camps raged in the months following The Hague Congress, but only in a few cases did it centre on their existing theoretical and ideological differences. Marx often chose to caricature Bakunin’s positions, painting him as an advocate of ‘class equalization’27 (based on the principles of the 1869 programme of the Alliance for Socialist Democracy) or of political abstentionism tout court. The Russian anarchist, for his part, who lacked the theoretical capacities of his adversary, preferred the terrain of personal accusations and insults. The only exception that set forth his positive ideas was the incomplete ‘Letter to La Liberté’ (a Brussels paper) of early October 1872 – a text which, never sent, lay forgotten and was of no use to Bakunin’s supporters in the constant round of skirmishes. The political position of the ‘autonomists’ emerges from it clearly enough:
There is only one law binding all the members […] sections and federations of the International […]. It is the international solidarity of workers in all jobs and all countries in their economic struggle against the exploiters of labour. It is the real organization of that solidarity through the spontaneous action of the working classes, and the absolutely free federation […] which constitutes the real, living unity of the International. Who can doubt that it is out of this increasingly widespread organization of the militant solidarity of the proletariat against bourgeois exploitation that the political struggle of the proletariat against the bourgeoisie must rise and grow? The Marxists and ourselves are unanimous on this point. But now comes the question that divides us so deeply from the Marxists. We think that the policy of the proletariat must necessarily be a revolutionary one, aimed directly and solely at the destruction of States. We do not see how it is possible to talk about international solidarity and yet to intend preserving States […] because by its very nature the State is a breach of that solidarity and therefore a permanent cause of war. Nor can we conceive how it is possible to talk about the liberty of the proletariat or the real deliverance of the masses within and by means of the State. State means dominion, and all dominion involves the subjugation of the masses and consequently their exploitation for the sake of some ruling minority. We do not accept, even in the process of revolutionary transition, either constituent assemblies, provincial government or so called revolutionary dictatorships; because we are convinced that revolution is only sincere, honest and real in the hands of the masses, and that when it is concentrated in those of a few ruling individuals it inevitably and immediately becomes reaction.28
Thus, although Bakunin had in common with Proudhon an intransigent opposition to any form of political authority, especially in the direct form of the state, it would be quite wrong to tar him with the same brush as the mutualists. Whereas the latter had in effect abstained from all political activity, weighing heavily on the early years of the International, the autonomists – as Guillaume stressed in one of his last interventions at The Hague Congress – fought for ‘a politics of social revolution, the destruction of bourgeois politics and the state’.29
How, then, did the ‘negative politics’ that the autonomists saw as the only possible form of action differ from the ‘positive politics’ advocated by the centralists? In the resolutions of the International Congress of Saint-Imier, held between 15 and 16 September 1872 on the proposal of the Italian Federation and attended by other delegates returning from The Hague, it is stated that ‘all political organization can be nothing other than the organization of domination, to the benefit of one class and the detriment of the masses, and that if the proletariat aimed to seize power, it would itself become a dominant and exploiting class’. Consequently, ‘the destruction of all political power is the first task of the proletariat’, and ‘any organization of so-called provisional and revolutionary political power to bring about such destruction can only be a further deception, and would be as dangerous to the proletariat as all governments existing today’.30 As Bakunin stressed in another incomplete text, ‘The International and Karl Marx’ (1872), the task of the International was to lead the proletariat ‘outside the politics of the State and of the bourgeois world’; the true basis of its programme should be ‘quite simple and moderate: the organization of solidarity in the economic struggle of labour against capitalism’.31 In fact, while taking various changes into account, this declaration of principles was close to the original aims of the organization and pointed in a direction very different from the one taken by Marx and the General Council after the London Conference of 1871.32
This profound opposition of principles and objectives shaped the climate in The Hague. Whereas the majority looked to the ‘positive’ conquest of political power,33 the autonomists painted the political party as an instrument necessarily subordinate to bourgeois institutions and grotesquely likened Marx’s conception of communism to the Lassallean Volksstaat [People’s State] that he had always tirelessly combated. However, in the few moments when the antagonism left some space for reason, Bakunin and Guillaume recognized that the two sides shared the same aspirations.34 In The Alleged Splits in the International, Marx had explained that one of the preconditions of socialist society was the elimination of the power of the state:
All socialists see anarchy as the following program: Once the aim of the proletarian movement – i.e., abolition of classes – is attained, the power of the state, which serves to keep the great majority of producers in bondage to a very small exploiter minority, disappears, and the functions of government become simple administrative functions.
The irreconcilable difference stemmed from the autonomist insistence that the aim must be realized immediately. Indeed, since they considered the International not as an instrument of political struggle but as an ideal model for the society of the future in which no kind of authority would exist, Bakunin and his supporters proclaim
anarchy in proletarian ranks as the most infallible means of breaking the powerful concentration of social and political forces in the hands of the exploiters. Under this pretext, [they ask to] the International, at a time when the Old World is seeking a way of crushing it, to replace its organization with anarchy.35
Thus, despite their agreement about the need to abolish classes and the political power of the state in socialist society, the two sides differed radically over the fundamental issues of the path to follow and the social forces required to bring about the change. Whereas for Marx the revolutionary subject par excellence was a particular class, the factory proletariat, Bakunin turned to the ‘great rabble of the people’, the so-called ‘lumpenproletariat’, which, being ‘almost unpolluted by bourgeois civilization, carries in its inner being and in its aspirations, in all the necessities and miseries of its collective life, all the seeds of the socialism of the future’.36 Marx the communist had learned that social transformation required specific historical conditions, an effective organization and a long process of the formation of class consciousness among the masses; Bakunin the anarchist was convinced that the instincts of the common people, the so-called ‘rabble’, were both ‘invincible as well as just’, sufficient by themselves ‘to inaugurate and bring to triumph the Social Revolution’.37
Another disagreement concerned the instruments for the achievement of socialism. Much of Bakunin’s militant activity involved building – or fantasizing about building – small ‘secret societies’, mostly of intellectuals: a ‘revolutionary general staff composed of dedicated, energetic, intelligent individuals, sincere friends of the people above all’,38 who will prepare the insurrection and carry out the revolution. Marx, on the other hand, believed in the self-emancipation of the working class and was convinced that secret societies conflicted with ‘the development of the proletarian movement because, instead of instructing the workers, these societies subject them to authoritarian, mystical laws which cramp their independence and distort their powers of reason’.39 The Russian exile opposed all political action by the working class that did not directly promote the revolution, whereas the stateless person with a fixed residence in London did not disdain mobilizations for social reforms and partial objectives, while remaining absolutely convinced that these should strengthen the working-class struggle to overcome the capitalist mode of production rather than integrate it into the system.
The differences would not have diminished even after the revolution. For Bakunin, ‘abolition of the state [was] the precondition or necessary accompaniment of the economic emancipation of the proletariat’;40 for Marx, the state neither could nor should disappear from one day to the next. In his ‘Political Indifferentism’, which first appeared in Almanacco Repubblicano [Republican Almanac] in December 1873, he challenged the hegemony of the anarchists in Italy’s workers’ movement by asserting that
if the political struggle of the working class assumes violent forms and if the workers replace the dictatorship of the bourgeois class with their own revolutionary dictatorship, then [according to Bakunin] they are guilty of the terrible crime of lèse-principe; for, in order to satisfy their miserable profane daily needs and to crush the resistance of the bourgeois class, they, instead of laying down their arms and abolishing the state, give to the state a revolutionary and transitory form.41
It should be recognized, however, that despite Bakunin’s sometimes exasperating refusal to distinguish between bourgeois and proletarian power, he foresaw some of the dangers of the so-called ‘transitional period’ between capitalism and socialism – particularly the danger of bureaucratic degeneration after the revolution. In his unfinished The Knouto-Germanic Empire and the Social Revolution, on which he worked between 1870 and 1871, he wrote:
But in the People’s State of Marx, there will be, we are told, no privileged class at all. All will be equal, not only from the juridical and political point of view, but from the economic point of view. […] There will therefore be no longer any privileged class, but there will be a government, and, note this well, an extremely complex government, which will not content itself with governing and administering the masses politically, as all governments do today, but which will also administer them economically, concentrating in its own hands the production and the just division of wealth, the cultivation of land, the establishment and development of factories, the organization and direction of commerce, finally the application of capital to production by the only banker, the State. […] It will be the reign of scientific intelligence, the most aristocratic, despotic, arrogant and contemptuous of all regimes. There will be a new class, a new hierarchy of real and pretended scientists and scholars, and the world will be divided into a minority ruling in the name of knowledge and an immense ignorant majority. […] Every state, even the most republican and most democratic state […] are in their essence only machines governing the masses from above, through an intelligent and therefore privileged minority, allegedly knowing the genuine interests of the people better than the people themselves.42
Partly because of his scant knowledge of economics, the federalist path indicated by Bakunin offered no really useful guidance on how the question of the future socialist society should be approached. But his critical insights already point ahead to some of the dramas of the twentieth century.
The International would never be the same again. The great organization born in 1864, which had successfully supported strikes and struggles for eight years, adopted an anticapitalist programme and established a presence in all European countries, finally imploded at The Hague Congress. Nevertheless, the story does not end with Marx’s withdrawal, since two groupings, much reduced in size and without the old political ambition and capacity to organize projects, now occupied the same space. One was the ‘centralist’ majority issuing from the final congress, which favoured an organization under the political leadership of a General Council. The other was the ‘autonomist’ or ‘federalist’43 minority, who recognized an absolute autonomy of decision-making for the sections. All that the two groups had in common was a rapid decline.
Marx and Bakunin continued their dispute at a distance. In 1873, for example, in an article ‘Political Indifferentism’ that first appeared in Italy in the Almanacco Repubblicano [Republican Almanac] of 1874, he ridiculed his rival’s positions on the conduct of workers’ struggles by peaceful means:
Workers must not go on strike; for to struggle to increase one’s wages or to prevent their decrease is like recognizing Wages: and this is contrary to the eternal principles of the emancipation of the working class! […] Workers must not struggle to establish a legal limit to the working day, because this is to compromise with the masters, who can then only exploit them for 10 or 12 hours, instead of 14 or 16. […] Workers should even less desire that, as happens in the United States of America, the State whose budget is swollen by what is taken from the working class should be obliged to give primary education to the workers’ children; for primary education is not complete education. It is better that working men and working women should not be able to read or write or do sums than that they should receive education from a teacher in a school run by the State. It is far better that ignorance and a working day of 16 hours should debase the working classes than that eternal principles should be violated!44
Marx also pointed out that Bakunin was not happy with violent forms of working-class political struggle:
If the workers replace the dictatorship of the bourgeois class with their own revolutionary dictatorship, then they are guilty of the terrible crime of lèse-principe; for, in order to satisfy their miserable profane daily needs and to crush the resistance of the bourgeois class, they, instead of laying down their arms and abolishing the State, give to the State a revolutionary and transitory form.45
For Bakunin, moreover, ‘workers must not even form single unions for every trade, for by so doing they perpetuate the social division of labour as they find it in bourgeois society’. In short, ‘the workers should fold their arms and stop wasting time in political and economic movements’, for ‘such movements can never produce anything more than short-term results’. In Marx’s view, although such positions might be understandable in a period of growth of capitalism and formation of the working-class masses, they were not tolerable in the second half of the nineteenth century:
The first socialists (Fourier, Owen, Saint-Simon, etc.), since social conditions were not sufficiently developed to allow the working class to constitute itself as a militant class, were necessarily obliged to limit themselves to dreams about the model society of the future and were led thus to condemn all the attempts such as strikes, combinations or political movements set in train by the workers to improve their lot. But while we cannot repudiate these patriarchs of socialism, just as chemists cannot repudiate their forebears the alchemists, we must at least avoid lapsing into their mistakes, which, if we were to commit them, would be inexcusable.46
In addition to the various articles and interventions designed to discredit each other, Bakunin’s positions and the most interesting traces of the polemic between the two men are contained in Statism and Anarchy (1873), the only major work that Bakunin ever completed, and in Marx’s marginal notes on his personal copy of the book. Both pieces of writing, a sizeable volume and brief critical remarks on it, belong to a period when Marx and Bakunin had each withdrawn from the active political scene to devote themselves to theoretical work – in Marx’s case with the hope of finishing the remaining volumes of Capital.
Bakunin continued to accuse Marx of having a ‘state-communist program’47 and of being responsible for the fact that his followers everywhere assumed the ‘ the side of the state and its supporters against popular revolution’.48 Again he wrongly equated Marx’s theories with those of Lassalle: ‘Marx’s theory provided a meeting point: a vast, unified, strongly centralized state. This was what Lassalle wanted, and Bismarck was already doing it. Why should they not join forces?’49 Starting from this imaginary construct, Bakunin asserted:
We have already expressed several times our profound aversion to the theory of Lassalle and Marx, which recommends to the workers, if not as their ultimate ideal, then at least as their immediate and principal objective, the creation of a people’s state. As they explain it, this will be nothing other than the proletariat raised to the level of a ruling class. If the proletariat is to be the ruling class, it may be asked, then whom will it rule? There must be yet another proletariat which will be subject to this new rule, this new state.50
In response to these baseless criticisms, Marx drafted some notes that offer precise indications about the nature of state power and the prerequisites of social revolution. In the ‘Conspectus on Bakunin’s Statism and Anarchy’ (1874–1875), he described his anarchist rival’s ideas as ‘schoolboyish rot’:
A radical social revolution is bound up with definite historical conditions of economic development; these are its premises. It is also only possible, therefore, where alongside capitalist production the industrial proletariat accounts for at least a significant portion of the mass of the people. […] Mr Bakunin […] understands absolutely nothing of social revolution, only its political rhetoric; its economic conditions simply do not exist for him. Now, since all previous economic formations, whether developed or undeveloped, have entailed the enslavement of the worker (whether as wage labourer, peasant, etc.), he imagines that radical revolution is equally possible in all these formations. What is more, he wants the European social revolution, whose economic basis is capitalist production, to be carried out on the level of the Russian or Slav[ic] agricultural and pastoral peoples, and that it should not surpass this level […] Willpower, not economic conditions, is the basis of his social revolution.51
As to the workers’ movement, ‘instead of fighting in individual instances against the economically privileged classes,’ it has ‘gained sufficient strength and organisation to use general means of coercion in its struggle against them’.52 During this phase, therefore, the proletariat takes part in political struggle by employing the very instruments of the bourgeois world that it seeks to destroy: ‘[It] still moves within political forms, which more or less correspond to it, it has at that stage not yet arrived at its final organisation, and hence to achieve its liberation has recourse to methods which will be discarded once that liberation has been attained.’53 Marx accused Bakunin of considering this possible form of struggle of the workers’ movement as inevitably bound to become contaminated by the political power existing today. According to Marx, things could not be otherwise: if the proletariat captures the power to rule, ‘its enemies and the old organisation of society will not yet have disappeared’. To eliminate them, it will have to use ‘forcible means, that is to say, governmental means’. During that period, the proletariat ‘remains a class itself, and if the economic conditions which give rise to the class struggle and the existence of classes have not vanished they must be removed or transformed by force’.54 However, this will not be a permanent condition, because ‘the class rule of the workers over the strata of the old world who are struggling against’– a rule so fiercely rejected by Bakunin – ‘can only last as long as the economic basis of class society has not been destroyed’.55 When that happens, class rule itself will disappear, and so too will the state ‘in the present political sense’.
This would have significant repercussions for the type of democracy that would be established in the new society. According to Marx, Bakunin did not understand that, with a change in ‘the economic foundation, the economic interrelations of the voters’, the form of representation would also acquire a radically different meaning. In socialist society, there exists ‘1) government functions no longer exist; 2) the distribution of general functions has become a routine matter which entails no domination; 3) elections lose their present political character’.56
Following his critical observations in the ‘Conspectus on Bakunin’s Statism and Anarchy’, and notwithstanding the health problems that continued to afflict him, Marx pursued his historical-political and economic research for a number of years. These studies, together with the stimulus from the major revolutionary events of the time, enabled him to make progress not only in his critique of capitalism, but also in his conception of the possible shape of post-capitalist society.
In his political writings, Marx had always identified Russia as one of the main obstacles to working-class emancipation on the European stage. But in his final years, he began to look rather differently at this country, having glimpsed in certain changes under way there some of the conditions for a major social transformation. Indeed, Russia seemed more likely to produce a revolution than Britain, where capitalism had created the proportionately largest number of factory workers in the world, but where the labour movement, enjoying better living conditions partly based on colonial exploitation, had grown weaker and undergone the negative conditioning of trade-union reformism.57
From the late 1850s, Marx followed – and greeted very favourably – the peasant movements in Russia that preceded the abolition of serfdom in 1861. Then in the seventies, having learned to read Russian, he kept up to date with events by consulting statistics and more thorough texts on social-economic changes, and by corresponding with prominent Russian scholars.
In 1881, as his growing interest in archaic forms of community led him to study contemporary anthropologists, and as his reflections constantly reached beyond Europe, a chance happening encouraged him to deepen his study of Russia. In mid-February, he received a brief but engaging letter from Vera Zasulich [1848–1919], a member of the Populist Black Redistribution group, who had made an attempt on the life of the St. Petersburg police chief. A great admirer of Marx, whom she thought must be aware of the great popularity of Capital in Russia, Zasulich asked him a ‘life and death question’58 for Russian revolutionaries and summarized the two different viewpoints that had emerged in their discussions:
Either the rural commune [obshchina], freed of exorbitant tax demands, payment to the nobility and arbitrary administration, is capable of developing in a socialist direction, that is, gradually organizing 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 onto the streets of the large towns in search of a wage.59
Zasulich further pointed out that some of those involved in the debate argued that ‘the rural commune is an archaic form condemned to perish by history, scientific socialism and, in short, everything above debate’. Those who held this view called themselves Marx’s ‘disciples par excellence’: ‘Marxists’. Their strongest argument was often: ‘Marx said so.’60
For nearly three weeks, Marx remained immersed in his papers, well aware that he had to provide an answer to a highly significant theoretical question and to express his position on a crucial political matter. The fruits of his labour were three long drafts and the eventual reply he sent to Zasulich. To summarize his analysis of the passage from ‘feudal production to capitalist production’,61 Marx chose a quotation from the French edition of Capital that he had inserted in November 1877 into a (never sent) letter to the editorial board of Otechestvennye Zapiski [Annals of the Fatherland]: the ‘dissolution of the economic structure of feudal society’ set free the elements of ‘the economic structure of capitalist society’ in ‘Western Europe’.62 The process did not occur throughout the world, therefore, but only in the Old Continent. Marx repeated that he had ‘expressly restricted […] the historical inevitability’ of the passage from feudalism to capitalist to ‘the countries of Western Europe’.63
Taking this as a kind of premise, he then developed some rich and detailed thoughts on the obshchina, as the germ of a future socialist society, and examined the concrete possibilities that this might come to pass in reality. To Marx the obshchina was not predestined to suffer the same fate as similar West European forms in earlier centuries, where ‘the transition from a society founded on communal property to a society founded on private property’64 was more or less uniform. To the question whether this was inevitable in Russia, Marx replied: ‘Absolutely not.’
With his usual flexibility and lack of schematism, Marx considered the possibility that the rural commune might change. In his view, the obshchina was open to two kinds of evolution: ‘either the element of private property […] will gain the upper hand over the collective element, or the latter will gain the upper hand over the former. […] All this depends on the historical surroundings in which it finds itself’;65 those existing at the time did not exclude a socialist development.
The first point that Marx underlined was the coexistence of the rural commune with more advanced economic forms. Marx observed that Russia was ‘contemporary with a higher culture, it is linked to a world market dominated by capitalist production. By appropriating the positive results of this mode of production, it is thus in a position to develop and transform the still archaic form of its rural commune, instead of destroying it’.66 The peasantry ‘can thus incorporate the positive acquisitions devised by the capitalist system without passing through its Caudine Forks’.67 Addressing those who denied the possibility of leaps and saw capitalism as an indispensable stage for Russia too, Marx asked ironically whether Russia had had ‘to pass through a long incubation period in the engineering industry […] in order to utilize machines, steam engines, railways, etc.’ Similarly, had it not been possible ‘to introduce in the twinkling of an eye, the entire mechanism of exchange (banks, credit institutions, etc.), which it took the West centuries to devise?’68 Russia could not slavishly repeat all the historical stages travelled by England and other West European countries. Logically, therefore, even the socialist transformation of the obshchina could happen without its being necessary to pass through capitalism.
In the end, Marx thought it essential to assess the historical moment at which this hypothesis was being considered. The ‘best proof’ that a socialist development of the rural commune was ‘in keeping with the historical tendency of the age’ was the ‘fatal crisis [here Marx’s political hopes led him to write one ‘fatal’ too many] which capitalist production has undergone in the European and American countries where it has reached its highest peak’. Drawing on ideas suggested by his reading of Ancient Society (1877), the book of the anthropologist Lewis Henry Morgan [1818–1881], he expected that the economic crisis then under way might create favourable conditions for the ‘destruction’ of capitalism and ‘the return of modern society to a higher form of the most archaic type-collective production and appropriation’.69
This makes it clear that Marx was not thinking of the ‘primitive type of cooperative or collective production [resulting] from the weakness of the isolated individual’, but of the fruits of the ‘socialization of the means of production’.70 The obshchina, he noted, was ‘the most modern form of the archaic type’ of communist property, which had itself ‘passed through a whole series of evolutions’.71
Marx criticized the ‘isolation’ of the archaic agricultural communes for, being closed in on themselves and having no contact with the outside world, they were politically speaking the economic form most in keeping with the reactionary tsarist regime: ‘the lack of connection between the life of one commune and that of the others, this localized microcosm, […] always gives rise to central despotism over and above the communes.’72
Marx had certainly not changed his complex critical judgement on the rural communes in Russia, and the importance of individual development and social production remained intact in his analysis. The drafts of his letter to Zasulich show no glimpse of that dramatic break with his former convictions. The new element is a theoretical openness to other possible roads to socialism that he had never previously considered or had regarded as unattainable.73 Marx concluded that the alternative envisaged by the Russian Populists was achievable:
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.74
If it was to come to pass, however, this hypothesis had to ‘descend from pure theory to the Russian reality’.75 To this end, Marx tried to identify the ‘capacity for further development’ of the obshchina.76 At that precise moment, it:
occupies a unique position, without precedent in history. Alone in Europe, it is still the predominant organic form of rural life throughout an immense empire. The common ownership of land provides it with the natural basis for collective appropriation, and its historical setting, its contemporaneity with capitalist production, lends it – fully developed – the material conditions for cooperative labour organized on a vast scale. It can thus incorporate the positive acquisitions devised by the capitalist system; […] it can gradually replace parcel farming with combined agriculture assisted by machines; […] it may become the direct starting point for the economic system towards which modern society tends and turn over a new leaf without beginning by committing suicide.77
This alternative was possible, and it was certainly better suited to Russia’s social-economic context than ‘capitalized farming on the English model’.78 But it could survive only if ‘collective labour supplanted parcel labour – the source of private appropriation’. For that to happen, two things were required: ‘the economic need for such a change and the material conditions to bring it about’.79 The fact that the Russian agricultural commune was contemporaneous with capitalism in Europe offered it ‘all the conditions necessary for collective labour’,80 while the peasant’s familiarity with the artel81 would facilitate the actual transition to ‘cooperative labour’.82
Political will and a favourable set of historical circumstances were therefore the basic prerequisites for the survival and radical transformation of the obshchina. In other words, despite all the upheavals that capitalism threatened to bring about, the socialist transformation of an archaic form of community like the obshchina was still possible:
It is no longer a matter of solving a problem; it is simply a matter of beating an enemy. To save the Russian commune, a Russian revolution is needed. […] If revolution comes at the opportune moment, if it concentrates all its forces so as to allow the rural commune full scope, the latter will soon develop as an element of regeneration in Russian society and an element of superiority over the countries enslaved by the capitalist system.83
Marx returned to similar themes in 1882. In January, in the preface to the new Russian edition of the Manifesto of the Communist Party, which he co-authored with Engels, the fate of the Russian rural commune is linked to that of proletarian struggles in Western Europe:
In Russia we find, face to face with the rapidly developing capitalist swindle and bourgeois landed property, which is just beginning to develop, more than half the land owned in common by the peasants. Now the question is: can the Russian obshchina, a form of primeval common ownership of land, even if greatly undermined, pass directly to the higher form of communist common ownership? Or must it, conversely, first pass through the same process of dissolution as constitutes the historical development of the West? The only answer possible today is this: If the Russian Revolution becomes the signal for a proletarian revolution in the West, so that the two complement each other, the present Russian common ownership of land may serve as the starting point for communist development.84
As to the reply to Zasulich, so long in the composition, he eventually sent it off on 8 March 1881. Although he had written several long and closely argued drafts, he decided to send her quite a short final version, in which he excused himself for not having provided the ‘concise exposé, intended for publication,’ which she had requested.85 Still, his ‘few lines’ were meant to ‘dispel any doubts’ that Zasulich might have ‘as to the misunderstanding in regard to my so-called theory’.86 Marx referred her to the quotation on the ‘expropriation of the agricultural producer’ from the French edition of Capital and stressed that his analysis was ‘expressly limited to the countries of Western Europe’, which saw ‘the transformation of one form of private property into another form of private property’.87 In the Russian case, by contrast, ‘communal property would have to be transformed into private property’.88 Hence his conclusion:
The analysis provided in Capital does not adduce reasons either for or against the viability of the rural commune, but the special study I have made of it, and the material for which I drew from original sources, has convinced me that this commune is the fulcrum of social regeneration in Russia, but in order that it may function as such, it would first be necessary to eliminate the deleterious influences which are assailing it from all sides, and then ensure for it the normal conditions of spontaneous development.89
Marx’s dialectical position therefore did not lead him to claim that a new economic system, based on the association of the producers, could come about through a fixed sequence of predefined stages. At the same time, he denied that the development of the capitalist mode of production was a historical inevitability in any part of the world.
Marx’s densely argued considerations on the future of the obshchina are poles apart from the equation of socialism with productive forces – an idea which asserted itself strongly in the Second International and social-democratic parties (even with sympathy for colonialism) and in the communist movement in the twentieth century. Marx spurned any rigid linking of social changes to economic transformations alone. Instead, he highlighted the specificity of historical conditions, and the centrality of human intervention in the shaping of reality and the achievement of socialism.
1See Georges Haupt, L’internazionale socialista dalla Comune a Lenin. Turin: Einaudi, 1978, p. 88.
2Karl Marx to Ludwig Kugelmann, 29 July 1872, in MECW, vol. 44, p. 413.
3On the role of the Belgian revolutionary in those years see César de Paepe, Entre Marx et Bakounine. Paris: Maspero, 1974.
4See Guillaume, L’Internationale, Documents et Souvenirs (1864–1878), vol. II, pp. 333–4; cf. Freymond, ‘Introduction’, in Henri Burgelin, Knut Langfeldt and Miklós Molnár (eds), La première Internationale, vol. I (1866–1868). Geneva: Droz, 1962, p. 25.
5Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx, ‘General Rules of the International Working Men’s Association’, in Marcello Musto (ed.), Workers Unite! The International 150 Years Later, p. 268.
6See Freymond, ‘Introduction’, in Burgelin, Lanfeldt and Molnár (eds), La première Internationale, vol I (1866–1868), p. x.
7Friedrich Engels, ‘On the Importance of Political Struggle’, in Musto (ed.), Workers Unite!, pp. 274–5.
8Karl Marx, 23 July 1872, in Institute of Marxism-Leninism of the C.C., C.P.S.U. (ed.), The General Council of the First International 1871–1872, p. 263.
9Karl Marx, 20 September 1871, in Henri Burgelin, Knut Langfeldt and Miklós Molnár (eds), La première Internationale, vol. II (1869–1872). Geneva: Droz, 1962, p. 195.
10Karl Marx, ‘On The Hague Congress’, in MECW, vol. 23, p. 255.
11See Haupt, L’Internazionale socialista dalla Comune a Lenin, p. 100.
12Burgelin, Langfeldt and Molnár (eds), La première Internationale, vol. II (1869–1872), p. 374. The opposition had already advocated reducing the General Council’s power at the Sonvilier Congress of November 1871, but Marx declared at The Hague: ‘we would prefer to abolish the General Council rather than see it reduce to the role of letter box’, ibid., p. 354.
13Ibid., p. 377.
14Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels and Paul Lafargue, ‘Critique of Bakunin’s Politics’, in Musto (ed.), Workers Unite!, p. 182.
15Ibid., p. 183.
16Various authors, ‘Statement of the Minority’, in Institute of Marxism-Leninism of the C.C., C.P.S.U. (ed.), The Hague Congress of the First International, vol. I: Minutes and Documents. Moscow: Progress, 1976, pp. 199–200.
17Friedrich Engels, 5 September 1872, in Burgelin, Langfeldt and Molnár (eds), La première Internationale, vol. II (1869–1872), p. 355.
18Maltman Barry, ‘Report of the Fifth Annual General Congress of the International Working Men’s Association, Held at The Hague, Holland, September 2–9, 1872’, in Hans Gerth, The First International: Minutes of The Hague Congress of 1872. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1958, pp. 279–80.
19Friedrich Engels, 5 September 1872, in Burgelin, Langfeldt and Molnár (eds), La première Internationale, vol. II (1869–1872), p. 356.
20Édouard Vaillant, Internationale et Révolution. A propos du Congrès de La Haye, in Bert Andréas and Miklós Molnár (eds), La première Internationale, vol. III: Les conflits au sein de l’Internationale, 1872–1873. Geneva: Institut Universitaire de Hautes Études Internationales, 1971, p. 140.
21Ibid., p. 142.
22Karl Marx, and Friedrich Engels, ‘Against Sectarianism’, in Musto (ed.), Workers Unite!, pp. 288–9.
23For a critical analysis of such positions see Molnár, ‘Quelques remarques à propos de la crise de l’Internationale en 1872’, in Colloque International sur La première Internationale (ed.), Le déclin de la Première Internationale, 1963, p. 439.
24Molnár, Le déclin de la Première Internationale, p. 144.
25Karl Marx, 22 September 1872, in Henri Burgelin, Knut Langfeldt and Miklós Molnár (eds), La première Internationale, vol. II (1869–1872), p. 217.
26Karl Marx to César De Paepe, 28 May 1872, in MECW, vol. 44, p. 387: ‘I can hardly wait for the next Congress. It will be the end of my slavery. After that I shall become a free man again; I shall accept no administrative functions any more, either for the General Council or for the British Federal Council.’
27Mikhail Bakunin, ‘Programme of the Alliance [International Alliance of Socialist Democracy]’, in Arthur Lehning (ed.), Michael Bakunin: Selected Writings. London: Jonathan Cape, 1973, p. 174.
28Mikhail Bakunin, ‘A Letter to the Editorial Board of La Liberté’, in Lehning (ed.), Michael Bakunin: Selected Writings, pp. 236–7.
29James Guillaume, ‘Anarchist politics’, in Musto (ed.), Workers Unite!, p. 290.
30Mikhail Bakunin and James Guillaume, ‘The Destruction of Political Power’, in Musto (ed.), Workers Unite!, p. 294.
31Mikhail Bakunin, ‘The International and Karl Marx’, in Sam Dolgoff (ed.), Bakunin on Anarchy. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1971, p. 303.
32On Bakunin’s rejection of the conquest of the state by the working class organized in a political party, see Lehning, ‘Introduction’, in idem (ed.), Bakunin – Archiv, vol. VI: Michel Bakounine sur la Guerre Franco-Allemande et la Révolution Sociale en France (1870–1871), p. cvii.
33See Guillaume, op. cit., p. 342.
34See, for example, Guillaume, L’Internationale, Documents et Souvenirs (1864– 1878), vol. II, pp. 298–9.
35From Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, ‘Against Sectarianism’, in Musto (ed.), Workers Unite!, p. 289.
36Bakunin, ‘The International and Karl Marx’, op. cit., p. 294.
37Ibid., pp. 294–5.
38Mikhail Bakunin, ‘Programme and Purpose of the Revolutionary Organization of International Brothers’, in Lehning (ed.), Michael Bakunin: Selected Writings, p. 155. Evidence of Bakunin’s deficient sense of reality is his claim: ‘Therefore there should be no vast number of these individuals. A hundred powerfully and seriously allied revolutionaries are enough for the international organization of the whole Europe. Two or three hundred revolutionaries are enough for the largest country’s organization’, ibid.
39Karl Marx, ‘Record of Marx’s speech on Secret Societies’, in MECW, vol. 22, p. 621.
40Mikhail Bakunin, ‘Aux compagnons de la Fédération des sections internationales du Jura’, in Lehning et al., Bakunin – Archiv, vol. II: Michel Bakounine et les Conflits dans l’Internationale. Leiden: Brill, 1965, p. 75.
41Karl Marx, ‘Political Indifferentism’, in MECW, vol. 23, p. 393.
42Mikhail Bakunin, Marxism, Freedom and the State. London: Freedom Press, 1950, p. 21.
43The term ‘autonomist’ International, used by Georges Haupt in L’Internazionale socialista dalla Comune a Lenin, p. 70, has been prefered to the expression ‘federalist’ International used by Jacques Freymond, see ‘Introduction’, in Andréas and Molnár (eds), La première Internationale, vol. III: Les conflits au sein de l’Internationale, 1872–1873, p. viii.
44Karl Marx, ‘Political Indifferentism’, in MECW, vol. 23, pp. 392–3.
45Ibid., p. 393.
46Ibid., p. 394.
47Mikhail Bakunin, Statism and Anarchy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990, p. 33.
48Ibid., p. 135.
49Ibid., p. 184.
50Ibid., p. 177.
51Karl Marx. ‘Conspectus of Bakunin’s Statism and Anarchy’, in MECW, vol. 24, p. 518.
52Ibid., p. 519.
53Ibid., p. 521.
54Ibid., p. 517.
55Ibid., p. 521.
56Ibid., p. 519.
57See what Marx and Engels wrote in 1882 in their preface to the second Russian edition of the Manifesto of the Communist Party: ‘During the Revolution of 1848–49, not only the European princes, but the European bourgeois as well, found their only salvation from the proletariat, which was just beginning to awaken, in Russian intervention. The Tsar was proclaimed the chief of European reaction. Today he is a prisoner of war of the revolution, in Gatchina [the castle where Alexander III took refuge after his father’s assassination] and Russia forms the vanguard of revolutionary action in Europe’, in MECW, vol. 24, p. 426.
58Vera Zasulich, ‘A Letter to Marx’, in Shanin (ed.), Late Marx and the Russian Road. New York: Monthly Review, pp. 98–9.
59Ibid.
60Ibid.
61Karl Marx, ‘Drafts of the Letter to Vera Zasulich: Second Draft’, in MECW, vol. 24, p. 360 (hereafter: Marx, followed by the indication of the number of the draft and the page number).
62Karl Marx, Le Capital, MEGA2, vol. II/7, p. 634. This point, added while Joseph Roy was working on the French translation, was not included by Engels in the fourth German edition of 1890, which became the standard version for later translations of Marx’s magnum opus.
63Karl Marx, ‘Second Draft’, in MECW, vol. 24, p. 360.
64Karl Marx, ‘Third Draft’, in MECW, vol. 24, p. 367.
65Karl Marx, ‘First Draft’, in MECW, vol. 24, p. 352.
66Marx, ‘Second Draft’, MECW, vol. 24, p. 362.
67Marx, ‘Third Draft’, MECW, vol. 24, p. 368.
68Marx, ‘First Draft’, MECW, vol. 24, p. 349.
69Ibid., p. 357.
70Ibid., p. 351.
71Marx, ‘Second Draft’, MECW, vol. 24, p. 362.
72Marx, ‘First Draft’, op. cit., p. 353.
73See Marian Sawer’s excellent work Marxism and the Question of the Asiatic Mode of Production. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1977, p. 67: ‘What happened, in the 1870s in particular, was not that Marx changed his mind on the character of the village communities, or decided that they could be the basis of socialism as they were; rather, he came to consider the possibility that the communities could be revolutionized not by capitalism but by socialism. […] He does seem to have entertained seriously the hope that with the intensification of social communication and the modernization of production methods the village system could be incorporated into a socialist society. In 1882 this still appeared to Marx to be a genuine alternative to the complete disintegration of the obshchina under the impact of capitalism.’
74Ibid., p. 354.
75Ibid.
76Marx, ‘Third Draft’, MECW, vol. 24, p. 368.
77Ibid.
78Marx, ‘First Draft’, MECW, vol. 24, p. 358.
79Ibid., p. 356.
80Ibid.
81The artel form of cooperative association, originally of Tatar origin, was based on blood ties and attended to the collective responsibility of its members toward the state and third parties.
82Marx, ‘First Draft’, MECW, vol. 24, p. 356.
83Ibid., pp 359–60.
84Marx and Engels, ‘Preface to the Second Russian Edition of the Manifesto of the Communist Party’, in MECW, vol. 24, p. 426.
85Karl Marx, ‘Letter to Vera Zasulich’, in MECW, vol. 24, p. 370. Cf. Musto, The Last Marx (1881–1883): An Intellectual Biography.
86Marx, ‘Letter to Vera Zasulich’, MECW, vol. 24, p. 370.
87Ibid.
88Ibid., pp. 370–1.
89Ibid., p. 371.