Todd
<URL: http://www.ruralworlds.msses.ru/eng/shanin-marx/chap1.html > Teodor Shanin Late Marx and the Russian Road. Marx and 'the Peripheries of Capitalism' Contents Introduction Part I: Late Marx Late Marx: gods and craftsmen Teodor Shanin Marx and revolutionary Russia Haruki Wada Late Marx: continuity, contradiction and leaning Derek Sayer and Philip Corrigan Part II: The Russian Road Marx-Zasulich correspondence: letters and drafts Vera Zasulich: A letter to Marx (February 1881) Karl Marx: Drafts of a reply (February/March 1881) Karl
Marx: The reply to Zasulich (March 1881) David Ryazanov: The discovery of the drafts (1924) Karl Marx: A letter to the Editorial Board of Otechestvennye Zapiski Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels: Preface to the second Russian edition of the Manifesto of the Communist Party Karl Marx: Confessions Marx after Capital:a biographical note (1867-1883) Derek Sayer The Russian scene: a biographical note Jonathan Sanders Part III: The Russian Revolutionary Tradition 1850 to 1890 Nikolai Chernyshevskii: Selected writings The People's Will: Basic documents and writings Marxism and the vernacular revolutionary traditions Teodor
Shanin Index Introduction Books ideally speak for themselves. A lengthy explanation of contents may deflect attention from the book's goal, especially so, in a volume which includes also papers of interpretation. This introduction will be brief. The mid-part of the book is mainly given to the drafts of Marx's 1881 discussion concerning rural Russia and some supplementary materials. The iconoclastic nature of this extraordinary piece of thinking aloud as against Marx's earlier views and later interpretations, the peculiar history of those drafts, the relevance of them for the so-called 'developing societies' of today, make these papers into one of the most important intellectual 'finds' of the century. Their first full and direct translation into English should enable the readers to judge for themselves the extent to which Marx's magnificent originality, foresight and heretical elanstayed with him to the very end. Bureaucrats and theologians of science in whichever camp will not like it. Good! The book's first part offers some interpretations of Marx's work at the last stage of its development, relating directly to the drafts published. It is polemical and not of one cloth - in such matters critical doubt and debate are essential. It was Marx who chose as his favourite motto De omnibus dubitandum -'doubt everything' - and the drafts below offer living proof of how much he was true to this principle. A way to honour his scholarship is to follow him in that. The final part three of the book presents some materials, which come to trace the intellectual bridges between Marx's writings on Russia and the Russian revolutionary tradition. It begins with extracts from those writings of Chernyshevskii, which influenced particularly and explicitly Marx's own work. It then places before western audiences, for once verbatim, the major programmatic and analytical statements of the People's Will - the Russian indigenous revolutionary organisation of Marx's own time, and a group to which Marx and Engels have consistently referred till the end as 'our friends'. The whole movement is remembered for its heroic defiance and bombings, which seem to have obscured its achievements in the realm of theory, namely, an alternative and highly original view of society, state and revolution within the specific social context they operated in. Also, their writings offer insight into analysis which merged, rarely acknowledged, into the thought of late Marx as well as that of Lenin. Looking at the subsequent century, one is struck by the contemporary potence of many of those statements. It is as if the global history and human society were only now catching up with many of the revolutionary considerations and illuminations of the 1880s, both those of the People's Will and Marx's own. A discussion of interdependence between Marx's analysis and the vernacular revolutionary tradition concludes both the section and the book while forming a link with the consideration of the socialisms of the twentieth century. Even on first perusal of the book, the reader should keep in mind its assumption that the Russia of those times was a 'developing' or 'peripheral capitalist' society, in the sense attached to those terms today — arguably the first of its type. It is only in that light that the papers presented by Marx can be considered in their full contemporary relevance. In the same light one can see the fuller significance of Marx's declared wish to use Russia for the Volume III of Capitalthe way he used England in Capital,Volume I. Also, there are clearly different conceptions of Marxism, one of which sees itself as consistent deduction from Capital,Volume I using whichever empirical evidence is handy to defend its absoluteness and its universality. The text which follows should help to transform Marx's comment of the 1870s about himself 'not being a Marxist' from a sly anecdote into a major illumination of Marx's own Marxism as against that of the first generation of his interpreters. For the rest, the book will 'speak for itself.
Part 1 Late Marx The first part of the book begins with an article which sets out the line of argument the book is to pursue: an historiography of Marx's thought which differs from that usually adopted, the place of Russian social data and revolution experience in it, the way it indicates Marx's developing insights into 'the peripheries' of the capitalism he was exploring in Volume I of Capital.The subsequent article by Wada offers a systematic textual analysis - an intellectual history - of the changes which occurred in Marx's writings since 1867 and considers their relation to the Russian scene and their direct relevance to Marx's growing awareness of the 'structure of backward capitalism'. Wada's work reflects also the very important achievement of the Japanese scholars, which was seldom given the attention and credit it deserves. The last item within Part One is a section of a larger article by Derek Sayer and Philip Corrigan which offered an early critical response to Shanin and Wada's views concerning the continuity and the change in Marx's thought. Their line of criticism is presented without being endorsed, in the spirit of the book's motto. The part of the article devoted to changes in Marx's understanding of the state, linking the experience of the Pans Commune of 1871 to his consideration of the Russian peasant commune in 1881, is presented in full as an interesting extension of the theme to which this book is devoted. <SNIP>
<URL: http://www.msses.ru/shanin/chayanov.html > CHAYANOV MESSAGE: ILLUMINATIONS, MISCOMPREHENSIONS, AND THE CONTEMPORARY "DEVELOPMENT THEORY" By Teodor Shanin (1986). T. Shanin, Russia as a "Developing Society"(New Haven, 1975).