Louis P. & Plekhanov

[Alex Trotter <uburoi@xxxxxxxxx>]

Louis is disappointed that I did not previously rise to his bait. Let me
just say that sometimes I am seemly, sometimes unseemly, and often coming
apart at the seems.

But he is right that I'm not a big fan of Plekhanov's. What I find
interesting about old Gyorgy is that he started out as an orthodox
Populist and wound up staking out the orthodox line of Russian Social
Democracy. The point of his making the switch revolved around the
question of historical determinism. Could Russia avoid the capitalist
road, as the Populists maintained (and Marx thought possible), or was it
fated to pass through the inevitable stage? In 1879 Plekhanov wrote an
article titled "The Law of the Economic Development of Society and the
Tasks of Socialism in Russia" in which he argued that history "is not a
uniform nor a mechanical process" and "Marx himself is not a man who
would be willing to stretch the whole human race on a Procrustean bed of
'universal laws.'" He also argued against Tkachev, a revolutionary who
favored a Blanquist, Jacobin, voluntarist seizure of power by a
revolutionary minority. (This is an attitude he later adopted against
Lenin.) But P. came to believe, after reading *Capital*, that capitalism
was in Russia, as elsewhere, a 'natural' tendency of social development.

"Against the the Populist 'subjective sociology' Pl;ekhanov set his rigid
'objectivism,' eliminating and ridiculing all attempts at thinking in
terms of 'what *should* be.' The scientific socialists--he
proclaimed--are struggling for socialism not because it *should be*, but
because it is the nearest stage in the magnificent and irresistable march
of History. 'The Social Democrat swims with the stream of history' and
the causes of historical development 'have nothing to do with human will
and consciousness.'"

--from *The Controversy Over Capitalism: Studies in the Social Philosophy
of the Russian Populists* by Andrej Walicki (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969)





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