From MR notes from the editor:
Given the concern with changing conditions in rural society in much of
this
issue (as represented by the work of Amin and William Hinton) we thought
that readers would be interested in the origin of a misunderstanding that
surrounds Marx's thoughts on rural life. One often hears the criticism
that
Marxism was from the beginning an extreme modernizing philosophy that
looked with complete disdain on rural existence. Did not Marx himself in
The Communist Manifesto, it is frequently asked, refer to "the idiocy of
rural life"? Here a misconception has arisen through the
mistranslation of
a single word in the authorized English translation of the Manifesto.
This
issue is addressed in Hal Draper's definitive, though little known work,
The Adventures of the Communist Manifesto (Berkeley: Center for Socialist
History, 1998)an expanded version of his earlier work, The Annotated
Communist Manifesto. Draper's Adventures includes a new English
translation
of the Manifesto, together with paragraph-by-paragraph annotations,
and the
most detailed history currently available of the various editions of the
Manifesto in major European languages.
In Draper's translation the phrase "the idiocy of rural life" in
paragraph
28 of the Manifesto is replaced with "the isolation of rural life." His
explanation for this correction is worth quoting at length:
IDIOCY OF RURAL LIFE. This oft-quoted A.ET. [authorized English
translation] expression is a mistranslation. The German word
Idiotismus did
not, and does not, mean "idiocy" (Idiotie); it usually means idiom, like
its French cognate idiotisme. But here [in paragraph 28 of The Communist
Manifesto] it means neither. In the nineteenth century, German still
retained the original Greek meaning of forms based on the word idiotes: a
private person, withdrawn from public (communal) concerns, apolitical in
the original sense of isolation from the larger community. In the
Manifesto, it was being used by a scholar who had recently written his
doctoral dissertation on Greek philosophy and liked to read Aeschylus in
the original. (For a more detailed account of the philological background
and evidence, see [Hal Draper], KMTR [Karl Marxs Theory of Revolution,
New
York, Monthly Review Press, 1978] 2:344f.) What the rural population
had to
be saved from, then, was the privatized apartness of a life-style
isolated
from the larger society: the classic stasis of peasant life. To inject
the
English idiocy into this thought is to muddle everything. The original
Greek meaning (which in the 19th century was still alive in German
alongside the idiom meaning) had been lost in English centuries ago.
Moore
[the translator of the authorized English translation] was probably not
aware of this problem; Engels had probably known it forty years
before. He
was certainly familiar with the thought behind it: in his Condition of
the
Working Class in England (1845), he had written about the rural
weavers as
a class "which had remained sunk in apathetic indifference to the
universal
interests of mankind." (MECW [Marx and Engels, Collected Works]
4:309.) In
1873 he made exactly the Manifesto's point without using the word
"idiocy":
the abolition of the town-country antithesis "will be able to deliver the
rural population from the isolation and stupor in which it has vegetated
almost unchanged for thousands of years" (Housing Question, Pt. III,
Chapter 3).
Marx's criticism of the isolation of rural life then had to do with the
antithesis of town and country under capitalism as expressed
throughout his
work. See also John Bellamy Foster, Marx's Ecology (New York: Monthly
Review Press), pp. 137-38.
Louis Proyect, Marxism mailing list: http://www.marxmail.org