474

p Nachdem eine Sache zur Klarheit gediehen ist, finden sich immer gewisse Gegner, die sogleich beflissen sind unter dem Scheme der Neuheit die Sache wieder zu verdunken und unklar zu machen. Ich bin dieser Art von Gegnern und Gegenreden hiiufig begegnet.  [474•* 

p Cuno Fischer

p Ces messieurs font tous du Marxisme, rnais de la sorte que vous avez connu en France, il y a dix ans, et dont Marx disait: tout ce que je sais, c’est que je ne suis pas marxiste, moi! Et probablement, il dirait de ces messieurs ce que Heine disait de ses imitateurs: "J’ai seme des dragons et j’ai recolte des puces."  [474•** ^^244^^

p From Frederick Engels’s letter to Paul Lafargue, Oct. 27, 1890^^244^^

p Mr. P. Struve has long been exercising himself in a “critique” of Marx, but until recently his “critical” exercises were not marked by any system: he confined himself, in the main, either to brief and prideful statements to the effect that he, Mr. P. Struve, was not infected with “orthodoxy” and stood "under the sign of criticism”, or to laconic remarks on the theme that, in such and such a question, Marx’s “orthodox” followers were in error whereas the truth emanated from the “critical” Marxists. However, brief remarks and laconic statements explained practically nothing regarding the roots of the “orthodox” Marxists’ errors or the 475

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Title page of Zarya No. 1, which carried the first article against P. Struve

476 477 proofs of the “critics” being in the right. One could only engage in surmises on the matter, the most probable of which was that Marx and his “orthodox” followers were in error because they had not been blessed with the grace of what is known as critical philosophy, one that so brightly illuminated the world-outlook of Mr. P. Struve and his “critical” fellow-thinkers. Although this surmise may have been highly probable, the reader possessed insufficient data to verify it. We now have these essential data at our disposal, so we are now in a position, in our turn, to subject our “critic” to criticism.

p In the articles we propose to offer the reader, we would like to analyse the "critical essay" published by Mr. P. Struve in Brauns Archiv^^215^^ under the title of "Die Marxsche Theorie der sozialen Entwickelung”,  [477•*  his review, published in the same book of the Archiv, of Eduard Bernstein’s well-known book Die Voraussetzungen des Sozialismus und die Aufgaben der Sozialdemokratie, and Kautsky’s no less well-known reply to Bernstein, "Bernstein und das Sozialdemokratische Programm”. This " critical essay" and this no less “critical” review are highly characteristic both of our author’s devices and his mode of thinking.

p In his essay, Mr. P. Struve remarks, he dealt, not so much with the materialist understanding of history in all its plenitude as with "its special application to the development from capitalism to socialism.” But while his “criticism” is directed only against part of Marx’s theory of social development, it touches, at the same time, upon all that theory in general and even upon some of its philosophical premises. Thus, it provides ample material for our criticism of the critic.  But first let us hear what Mr. Struve has to say.

p He asserts that the part of Marx’s theory he is subjecting to analysis has a triple foundation, namely: 1) the theory of the development of the productive forces in capitalist society or, in other words, "the theory of the socialisation and concentration of production, and the theory of industrial anarchy in capitalist society”; 2) the theory of the deterioration of the conditions of the lower classes of society, or "the theory of the impoverishment and the theory of the expropriation of the petty capitalists by the big ones”, and finally, 3) the theory of the proletariat’s revolutionary role, i.e., "the theory of the socialist mission of the proletariat, which is formed by the development of capitalism and grows in the course of that development".

p In his explanation of the latter theory, Mr. P. Struve goes on to add: "The proletariat is subjected to impoverishment, but at the same time achieves a social and political maturity which 478 makes it capable of overthrowing the capitalist system through an active class struggle, and replacing it with the socialist system.” But what does our critic think of this triple foundation of Marx’s theory?

While he does not take up the question of whether Marx gave a correct definition of the relative importance of each of these three trends, Mr. P. Struve recognises their actual existence in capitalist society of the first half of the nineteenth century; the theory of impoverishment is a simple statement of fact; the development of the productive forces was there for all to see; the proletariat’s revolutionary actions, ranging from spontaneous outbursts to the communist movement, were questions of the day. However, in our critic’s opinion, Marx was grossly in error in asserting that the trends he had named led to socialism. That assertion had no real foundation, and was simply a utopia.  [478•*  The triumph of socialism was quite impossible as long as the impoverishment of the masses was an indisputable fact. The workers’ impoverishment was incompatible with a degree of maturity in that class that would render it capable of carrying through the socialist revolution. That was why the actual state of things in the forties left no room for a social optimism to which any utopia is alien: were capitalism really doomed to collapse, there would be nobody to erect the edifice of socialism on its ruins. If, nevertheless, all pessimism was quite alien to Marx, that was due to the very groundlessness of his socio-political world-outlook. "An imperative psychological urge to prove the historical necessity of an economic order based on collectivism" says Mr. P. Struve, "forced the socialist Marx, in the forties, to deduce’" (deduzieren) "socialism from more than insufficient premises."  [478•**  Marx subsequently substantially modified, in Mr. P. Struve’s opinion, his pessimistic view of the conditions of the working class in capitalist society but did not reject it completely and quite consciously. The glaring contradiction between the impoverishment of the working class, on the one hand, and society’s development towards socialism, on the other, remained beyond his purview. "This actual contradiction even acquired, in his eyes, a lawful appearance, presenting itself to him as a dialectical contradiction that was striving towardsits resolution.  [478•***  In view of this strange psychological aberration, there is nothing surprising in Mr. P. Struve’s seeing himself forced to turn his attention to the "doctrine of development through the growth of contradictions" (durch Steigerung der Widerspriiche), and subjecting that doctrine to close analysis.