How to Save Marx from the Alchemists of Revolution Author(s): Shlomo Avineri Source: Political Theory, Vol. 4, No.

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II. HOW TO SAVE MARX FROM THE ALCHEMISTS OF REVOLUTION

SHLOMO A VINERI Hebrew University of Jerusalem

T IS SLIGHTLY AMUSING (and flattering) to learn that Professor Alan Gilbert feels that Marxhas to be salvagedfrom the clutches of my interpretationof his theories. It is easy to reply in land, but I would try to refrain from such polemic and attempt, instead, to focus on what seem to me to be the cardinal points of difference between our varying interpretationsof Marx. The main thrust of Gilbert's argument appears to me to be that I rmsreadMarx because I do not depict him as viewing violent revolutionas the exclusive means through which a communist society could be achieved. One of the main points of my contention has been that both orthodox Social Democrats and orthodox Leninist Communists were wrong in depicting Marx as advocating either exclusively gradualistor exclusively violent means of transforming capitalist society Marx, I argued, tried to make distinctions in uhstheory of revolutionarypractice, and his views are much more complex than the latter-dayrevolutionary/ evolutionarydichotomy seems to suggest. It is this evidence about the complexity of Marx'sviews on the subject that Gilbert chooses to overlook. He may have good political reasons for this: the casual references to Mao may be an indication. This is, of course, legitimate, but it cannot serve as a license to overlook the complexity of
POLITICAL THEORY, Vol. 4 No. 1, February 1976 ) 1976 Sage Publications, Inc.

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Marx's heritage on this subject; that such complexity may perplex the True Believerlies outside the realmof scholarlydiscussion. At the risk of repeatingsome of the evidence which can be found in my book, I would like to reiterate briefly Marx'sposition on the question of gradualversus violent overthrowof capitalistgovernments.Marx'sclassical text on this is his AmsterdamSpeech of September 18, 1872:
We do not assert that the attainment of [political supremacy of the workers] requires identical means. We know that one has to take into consideration the institutions, mores, and traditions of the different countries, and we do not deny that there are countries, like England and America and if I am familiar with your institutions, Holland, where labour may attain its goal by peaceful means.

In other countries, like France and Germany,Marxgoes on to suggest, the transformationwill have to be undertakenby a violent overthrow of the existing machinery of government.It seems that the criteriaused by Marx to make the distinction are fairly obvious: the transformationto socialism can be relatively peaceful in countries where there is a large proletariat, where there are well-entrenched parliamentaryinstitutions more or less based on universalsuffrage, and where there does not exist a strong state machinery which controls administration. In continental countries like France and Germany, on the other hand, where the bourgeoisieis still relativelyweak, where the majonty of the populationis still made up of peasants rather than of industnal workers,where there is institutions-there the transformano tradition of genuinely parliamentary tion will have to be violent, because existing istitutions do not bear within themselves the dialectical potential of qualitativechange. As Marx remarksm the Capital, the process of social transformation,when it will reach the continent, "will take a form more brutal or more humane, accordingto the degreeof developmentof the workingclass itself."2 Marx'sattitude to universal Gilbert may feel that I have "Hegelianlzed" If Marx would have referred to universalsuffrage only m his suffrage. theoreticalwritingsof 1843, this might have been the case. But "Hegelian" the truth of the matteris that universalsuffrageappearsagainand againin Marx's later writings as well, with special reference to England. In an articleon the ChartistsMarxsays in 1852:
Universal suffrage is the equivalent of political power for the working class of England, where the proletariat forms the large majority of the population, where, in a long, though underground civil war, it has gained a clear consciousness of its position as a class, and where even the rural districts know

Avineri / HOWTO SAVE MARX [37]

and no longer any peasants,but only landlords, industrialcapitalists(farmers) hired labourers. The carryig of Universal Suffrage in England would, therefore, be a far more socialistic measure than anything which has been honoured with that name on the Continent. Its inevitableresult, here, is the of political supremacy the workingclass 3

One should poit out that the agitational activity of the Chartistsis here referred to by Marx as a "long, though underground civil war" revolutionary praxis is not merely manning barricades,but also creating the organizationaland consciousness-raising preconditions for transformation and change. Hyndman remarksin his memoires, that m the 1870s Marx said that "Englandis the one country in which a peaceful revolution is possible," and m a letter to Hyndmanof December 1880, Marxremarks that "if the unavoidableevolution [in England] turn into a revolution,it would not only be the fault of the ruling class, but also of the working class."4 This is a truly remarkablestatement, for here Marxcastigatesthe worlkng class for possibly missing the opportunity for gradualchange and thus makingrevolutionarychangeinto the only possibility That this is not just a momentary mood is evident from the fact that Marx said very much the same things 10 years earlier, in an mterviewfor an Amercan journal:
In England, the way is open for the workig class to develop their political power. In a place where they can achieve their goal more quickly and more would be a folly.5 msurrection securelythroughpeacefulpropaganda,

And in a speech commemoratingthe fourth anniversaryof the Polish Insurrectionof 1863, Marxsays on January22, 1867It is possible that the strugglebetween the workersand the capitalistswill be less terribleand less bloddy than the strugglebetween the feudal lordsand the bourgeoislem Englandand France.Let us hope so.6

These are all very explicit statements, directly related to revolutionary praxis. Many of them have been overlooked for political reasonsby parties that called themselves Marxists. It may be that Marx was historically wrong on some, or even most, of these instances: but the record, at least, should not be re-written. I certainly did not intend to suggest that Marx never contemplated a revolutionary transformation of society' on the contrary. Certainly the Ten Regulations in the Manifesto are a bluepnnt for a violent intervention m the course of the development of capitalist society Gilbert is right when he says that "winning the battle of

[38] POLITICAL THEORY / FEBRUARY 1976

democracy"cannot be reducedto universalsuffrage:where did I ever limit it m such a way9 But neither can "winning the battle of democracy"be conceived, according to Marx, without universalsuffrage, and it is my guess that what Gilbert really means is to suggestthat "winningthe battle of democracy"is merely imposingthe will of the majority(the proletariat) on the rmnonty (the bourgeoisie),without necessarilygetting entangledin a democratic process based on majortanan rules. This is certainlywhat Leninism was about, and for Lenin it did not matter that in his case, Russia, the proletariatwas not ever the majorty But to suggestthat this is the generalrule in Marxis not borne out by the texts. This bnngs me to the question of the dictatorsuhp the proletariat. of the Ten Regulations of the Manifesto are dictatonal insofar as Certainly the gradual expropriationof the bourgeoisie is not based on consensual politics: no doubt about it. But what I wanted to drawattention to in my remark was that the term "dictatorship of the proletariat"appears in Marx'swhole corpus only a very few times, and that it does not have the ideologicalcentralityand connotation which it acquiredlater on. The reason for this is simple enough, though it has sometimes been forgotten. For Marx,every form of political power is class power, and thus dictatorialwith regardto the other classes of society that do not shareit. Hence, every state, whateverits class-base,is dictatorial.The political rule of the bourgeoisieis a dictatorshipof the bourgeoisie,even if it is cloaked m parliamentary garb, and, consequently, the political rule of the proletanat is always a dictatorshipof the proletariat.Politicalrule as such is dictatorial,and therefore the ultimate aim of socialismis not merely to substitute the class rule of the proletariat for the class rule of the bourgeoisie, because in that case just one form of dictatorshlpwould be replaced by another- the aim of communismis the abolition of political powerqua political power, becauseall political power is dictatorial. Since every form of political power is dictatoral, it goes without saying, as far as Marx is considered, that the "winnlng of the battle of democracy" by the proletariat,its elevation to a dormnantclass, is ipso facto the dictatorship of the proletariat-just as the preceding form of government had been the dictatorshipof the bourgeoisle."Dictatorshlp" m this way as it is used by Marx refers directly to the class nature of political rule, not to the way in which any form of governmentis being carned out. For this reason while Marx did refer several times to proletarian rule after the overthrow of capitalism and before the Aufhebung of the state as "dictatorshlpof the proletariat,"he did not make a big fuss about the term: he must have thought that he was expressingthe obvious.

Avineri / HOW TO SAVE MARX [39]

But m the course of the history of the revolutionary socialism, a different element was added to this. Within the Russian revolutionary movement there appearedearly on a very different context within which the term "dictatorship"began to be used. Faced with the nonexistence of a revolutionarybourgeoisie, let alone a revolutionaryproletariat,Russian revolutionaneswere confronted from very early on with the fact that the great masses-the peasants-were the mainstay of Czarist autocracy, and the Populist attempts at mobilizingthem turned out to be failures.It is for this reason that the revolutionarymovement m Russia began to develop a theory of "revolutionarydictatorship,"because it became clear that there was no chance m Russian conditions for a popular revolution ever to become successful. Tkatchev was perhaps the most explicit of these theoreticlans of revolutionary dictatorship. He pinned his revolutionary hopes on the radicalized,deracinatedRussian mtelligentsia, which would form the core of this revolutionarydictatorship.It is here that the Russian revolutionary movement developed on entirely different lines from the Western European one: while in the West, the revolutionarymovement, from the French Revolution through Mazzinl and Marx, was always connected with democratic ideas, m Russia because of its social structure and due to the lack of a wide popular base among the majority of the population, the revolutionarymovement became elitist, authortarian, and dictatoral. Marx was perhaps one of the first to sense this m his relationshipwith Bakunm,who representedthis elitist traditionemanating from the terrible choices Russian conditions placed before revolutionaries i the CzaristEmpire.7 It is within this very distinct Russian context that the Marxian statements about the "dictatorship of the proletariat"were taken up by RussianMarxistsand imbued with a very different meaning: for it was m the Russian Social Democratic movement that the term "dictatorshipof the proletariat" lost its analytical meaning (signifying that every form of class government is dictatorial) and acquiredan ideological connotation, pointing to the way and method in which the revolution will be carried in out. This is how a term that was marginal Marxbecame centralin Lenin, and this historical backgroundis necessary to understandthat one cannot read "dictatorshipof the proletariat"in the few places where it appearsin Marxand attribute to it the meaning it has m Lenin or in the platformof the vanous Russian revolutionary socialist groups. Again, this is not a reflection about the right tactics for revolutions (which does not really interest us here): the question is how a term is to be understood in the context of a thinker's theory Here we have to be careful with our

[40] POLITICAL THEORY / FEBRUARY 1976

methodology not to read later historcal developments into texts that predate them. Gilbert's a-hlstoncity prevents him from beig able to perceiveMarxin his properhistorcal context. This a-histoncity is a very serious flaw in Gilbert'sanalysisand it leads him on a number of wild tnps. It leads hun to suggest that there was something called "Marx'sRevolutionary Strategy in 1848" from which some positive (as distinct from crtical) lessons could be drawn. 1848 was a failure, as far as Marxwas concerned, and one should be remindedthat in the concluding chapter of the Manifesto, which was completed by Marx just a few months before the outbreak of the February Revolution in France in 1848, Marxenvisageda long, protractedperiod of development and class struggle and was not aware at all that something ratherviolent was around the comer. 1848 was a total surprisefor him, just as it was for everyone else. Whateverhe wrote duringthe revolution of 1848 does not suggest any unique revolutionary strategy, and his account of the June isurrection in Pans is imbued with his deep feeling of failure-a feeling which Gilbert totally rmsrepresents. much did he consider it a failure So that many years later, m 1871, when he was warning the French proletariatnot to erupt in another insurrectionafter the collapse of France i the Franco-PrussianWar, he calls upon them not to repeat past mlstakes-"they have not to recapitulate the past, but to build up the future. Let them calmly and resolutely improve the opportunities of Republicanliberty, for the work of their own class organization."8Gilbert would like similarly to think that Marx'sviews on the Pans Commune were simply laudatory; but he overlooks the fact that prior to the msurrectionMarx sent ermssariesto Paris to preventmembersof the First International from doing "all kinds of follies in the name of the Interational. They want to establish a Commune de Paris. "9 And many years later, when the agony and anger have passed, Marx calmly writes to a Dutch socialist about the Pans Commune:
Apart from the fact that this was merely the rising of a city under exceptional conditions, the majority of the Commune was m no way socialist, nor could it be. With a modicum of common sense, however, it could have reached a compromose with Versailles useful to the whole mass of the people-the only 0 thig that could have been reached at the time.

Gilbert would have been aghast at such a quote from Marx, for here Marx appears to express the ultimate heresy' "circumstanceswere not npe " This is one of the main issues on which Gilbertcriticizesme, and he makesevery statement referringto socioeconomic conditions equivalentto

Aviner / HOWTO SAVE MARX [41]

economic determinism. As a matter of fact, one of his major theoretical cnticisms of my interpretationof Marx is, as he says at the outset of his essay, that I am responsible for a "humanist translation of Marxwhich leaves the economic and political conclusions of the economic determinist mterpretationperfectly intact." I have to admit that at first this criticism struck me as extremely odd, as it has always been my view that the way I read Marxcertainly tred to emancipate him from the mechanistic determinism which, to my mind, was added into Marxismby Engels, Plekhanov, and Kautsky It took me some time to realize that what Gilbert calls "economic determinism" refers to any instance in which economic considerationswere taken mto account. The reason for this in Gilbert is obvious: for him, objective conditions are really bunk. What matters is the will-and physical force and the readiness to use it. To me the uniqueness of Marx's view of revolutionary praxis is that it tries to focus on the juncture where the objective economic conditions coalesce with the subjectiveelement of will as expressed in class consciousness. I perfectly agree with Gilbert that orthodox Social Democracy has emasculated this synthesis by adopting the Engelslan model of economic determinism:the problem, however, is that neither can one represent an adequate view of Marx's theory by focusing on the will alone, denouncing every reference to the socioeconomic infrastructure "economic determmlsm."At the risk of using a as "orthodox" language myself, I would have thought that such highly dismissal of the "real" base of historical development was traditionally called "idealism"in the Marxistjargon, and this is what Marxcriticized in the "True Socialists." That such views nowadays are expressed by Mao rather than by Moses Hess does not diminish from the fact that they are not, repeat not, the views held by Marx. Similarly Gilbert is off on a tangent when he says that Marxwas a great admirer of the French Revolution and did not view it as a "merely political" revolution. The question then arises, why did it not achieve the ultimate alms of revolution? Given Gilbert's premises, "economic conditions" are ruled out; so may it then not be its political praxis that was wrong or incomplete9 Further, Gilbert seems to suggest that when Marx praises the achievements of the French Revolution in putting an end to Absolutism and Feudalism,he is attributingit exclusively to the Jacobin Terror. It appearsthen that Gilbert identifies the French Revolution with Robespierre'sReign of Terror;but to Marx, the Revolution was a lengthy process in which socioeconomic conditions were changedthrough political power over a period of years, by Napoleon as much as by Robespierre,by

[421 POLITICAL THEORY / FEBRUARY 1976

the Girondists as much as by the Montangards.Reducing the French Revolution to the Terroris certaily not Marx'sunderstanding it. May of we call such a view Jacobin? This leads me to a number of instances in which Gilbertmisrepresents my views-and then sets out to criticize them on the basis of this misrepresentation.On page 17 he says that "Avinen further adds [and here there is a referenceto pp. 190-191 of my book] that if the French revolutionarieshad been socialist rather than republicans,they were still doomed to fail because 'circumstances yet unripefor change'" I could are not find on pp. 190-191 of my book any statement even vaguely resemblingsuch a view, nor could I recallmyself ever sayinganythinglike that anywhereelse in the book. On page 20 of his essay, Gilbertsays that "Avmen asserts that Marx despised Babeuf." There is no referenceadded here, and for good reason. where did I ever assertanythinglike that? And of lastly, in common with many other Interpreters Marxwho sometimes do not distinguish between Marx and Engels and attribute to Marx statements made by Engels as if they were Siamese twins mtellectually responsible for each other's statements, on page 23 Gilbert says in a paragraphthat appears to be referring to Marx's views that the June insurrection "made socialist consciousness more of a mass reality"-but only by looking at the footnote does one realize that this statement is taken from Engels.To Marx,as I have pointed out, what happenedin June 1848 was much clearer' "Whatsuccumbed in these defeats was not the revolution. It was the prerevolutionary traditional appendages. Persons, illusons, conceptions, projects from which the revolutionary party before the FebruaryRevolutionwas not free."' To sum up: Gilbert'scriticismis itself a highly interestingand origial interpretationof Marx.Originalnot because it has not been voiced before (it has), but because it reads into Marx'stexts an analysisand theory that is not there. There is no reasonwhy such a voluntarstic, and hence elitist, theory of revolution should not have its own legitimacy The only questionis why it has to be attributedto Marx. Marx himself spent much of his political activity combating precisely such voluntarlsticviews. Marxvalued Utopian socialism very much for its histoncal contribution toward the evolution of socialism: so did Hegel value every previous philosophy later to be aufgehoben into his own system, but the elitism and voluntarism of the Utopians were always criticized by him; so was Lasalle,and for similarreasons.And duringthe violent debates in 1850, which led to the schism within the League of Communists,Marxcounters the accusation of the radicalwing by saying:

Avineri / HOWTO SAVE MARX [43] While we tell the workers: "You have to endure and go through 15, 20, 50 years of crvil war in order to change the circumstances, in order to make yourself fit for power"-instead of that, you say "We must come to power immediately, or otherwise we may just as well go to sleep." As far as enthusiasm is concerned, one doesn't need to have much of it m order to We devote belong to a party believed to be about to come to power. ourselves to a party which is precisely rather far from achievig power. Louis Blanc serves as the best example of what can be achieved when one attains power prematurely 12

Power to Marxis never purely physical or political-achieved by the will alone this Nietzschean attitude cannot go well with a world view rooted in a materialist conception of history On another occasion during the same year, arguing agamst Jacobi-Blanquist immediate "action" plans, Marxsharply sums up his views of such philosophies of the revolutionary deed which try to abstractfrom economic and social conditions:
It is self-evident that these conspirateurs do not limit themselves to the mere task of organizing the proletariat; not at all. Their business lies precisely in trying to preempt the developing revolutionary process, to drive it artifically to crisis, to create a revolution ex nihilo, to make a revolution without the conditions of a revolution. For them, the only necessary condition for a revolution is an adequate organization of their conspiracy. They are the alchemists of the revolution, and they share all the wooly-mmdedness, follies and idees fixes of the former alchemists. They throw themselves on discoveries which would work revolutionary wonders: incendiary bombs, hell-machies of magical impact, emeutes which ought to be the more wonder-making and sudden the less they have any rational ground.13

A friend of mme who happened to be m Paris during the June 1968 perod, wrote to me a detailed description of the revolutionarymood on the Rive gauche m those heady days. Himself a connoisseur of Marx,he started by saying: "Marx opens his Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte by referring to a statement by Hegel that in history all things happen twice, once as tragedy and the second time as farce. Marx was wrong. Thigs happen three times: once as tragedy, the second time as farce and the third time as the theater of the absurd." the Or to paraphrase last quotation brought from Marx:Bewareof the Alchemistsof the Revolution.

NOTES
1. The First International: Minutes of the Hague Congress of 1872, H. Gerth, ed. (Madison, 1958), p. 236.

[44] POLITICAL THEORY / FEBRUARY 1976 2. Karl Marx, Capital (Moscow, n.d.), Vol. I, p. 9. 3. Karl Marx, "The Chartists," New York Daily Tribune, August 25, 1852. (reprinted in Karl Marx, On Britain [Moscow, 19621, p. 361) 4. H. M. Hyndman, The Record of an Adventurous Life (London, 1911), pp. 273, 283. 5. The mterview appeared m Woodhull & Claflin's Weekly, August 12, 1871. 6. The speech was originally published in the Polish emigre paper Glos Wolny, February 2, 1867 (reprinted in Karl Marx and Fredrich Engels, Werke [Berlin, 1962 , XVI, p. 204) 7 In a letter to Marx dated April 29, 1870, Engels remarks a propos of Bakunm's statement that there are 40,000 Russian revolutionary students awaiting uhs call to msurgency "How awful for the world (hadn't it just been a shameless lie) that Russia has 40,000 revolutionary students, with no proletariat, or even a revolutionary peasantry behind them; with no career ahead of them except the dilemma: Siberia-or emigration to Western Europe. If there is anything which could ruin the Western European movement, then it would be the importation of these 40.000 more or less educated, ambitious, hungry Russian Nihilsts; all of them " (Marx and Engels, Bnefwechsel, Vol. IV, p. officers' cadets without an army. 375). 8. "Second Address of the General Council of the International Workingmen's Association on the Franco-Prussian War," m Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Selected Works (Moscow, 1962), Vol. I, p. 497 9. Marx to Engels, September 6, 1870 (Briefwechsel, Vol. IV, p. 453). 10. Marx to Ferdinand Domela-Nieuwenhuis, February 22, 1881, m Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Selected Correspondence (Moscow, n.d.), p. 410. 11. Marx and Engels, Selected Works, Vol. I, p. 139. 12. Marx and Engels, Werke, Vol. VIII, pp. 598-600. 13. The article was published in Neue Rheinische Zeitung: Politischokonomische Revue, No. 4 (April, 1850), (reprinted, Berlin, 1955, p. 200).