THE "RUSSIAN QUESTION"-IN THE 19TH CENTURY
Avineri, Shlomo
The debacle of the 1848 revolution was a severe shock to most European radicals of that period. The resilience of the anciens regimes proved that, contrary to revolutionary prophecies, the...
...A few years older than Marx, alternatively close to him and quarreling with him, Hess came from the same left-Hegelian milieu that had nourished pre-1848 German socialist radicalism...
...He argued that Europe had exhausted itself: the failure of the European revolutions of 1848 had proved once and for all that the West could not become a source of any future transformation...
...Karl Marx, in his London exile, abandoned his hopes for an imminent social upheaval, stayed away from the more radical, Jacobin elements of the League of Communists, and immersed himself in his journalistic and scholarly work, expecting the long-range internal contradictions of capitalist society to bring about the dissolution of the bourgeois order...
...I only deny the possibility that the revolution can reach its goal through ways which deflect it from this goal...
...252,256-57...
...The resilience of the anciens regimes proved that, contrary to revolutionary prophecies, the millennium was not around the corner...
...Many emigrated to the United States...
...The Germanic barbarian tribes, Hess argues, adopted Christianity from the conquered Romans, and the medieval world was built on the foundations of this Christianity, which did not originate with the barbarians but rather was adopted by them...
...Historical reality, Hess argues in his first letter, should not be viewed exclusively from a philosophical point of view: The focus of all life is its economy, the mode through which every living creature produces its material existence...
...Von dem anderen Ufer: Aus dem russischen Manuskript (Hamburg, 1850...
...it will not win unless the old antagonistic interests disappear as well as the separation of races and classes...
...Briefwechsel, p. 253.] As if to soften this uncompromising condemnation, Hess adds in a postscript to this letter: I do not deny the possibility of a victory of barbarism...
...of the revolution, Moses Hess developed a number of interesting ideas that deserve closer scrutiny...
...Hess, in his second letter to Herzen, disagrees, of course, with Donoso Cortes's equation of socialism with barbarism...
...Again in language obviously reminiscent of many of Marx's own statements, The reactionary Spaniard [Donoso Cortes] sees in the real historical movement only its ideological side...
...For me, the 80 victory of reaction and the separation of national interests are identical, just as the victory of the revolution is identical with the fraternization of all nations...
...It is part of a forthcoming study entitled "Moses Hess: Prophet of Communism and Zionism," to be published by New York University Press...
...Many just dropped out, quietly slipping into obscure and respectable bourgeois existence...
...For this was the main thrust of Herzen's pamphlet...
...The philosopher "from the other shore" [Herzen] consoles himself with a Slavonic illusion...
...once conditions in Europe, in France, in Paris, will be again more favorable for a revolution, the Slavonic illusion will fade into the background...
...Between February and April–May of 1850, Hess wrote five letters to Herzen, who was also living in Paris at that time, and in these he takes issue with the ideas of From the Other Shore...
...Paradoxically, the socialists now turn to the country that did not experience any revolution in 1848...
...It is Herzen's lack of economic understanding that causes him to look for chimerical solutions in the Russian steppes: 82 For the economic revolution—the form under which England will participate in the movement of our age—you, as a political ideologue, have no understanding at all...
...Precisely because of this, Hess maintains, he is careful to distinguish between what he calls "progressive" and "reactionary" socialism...
...If the powers-that-be withstood such a powerful revolutionary wave, how were they ever going to be toppled...
...Briefwechsel, p. 249.] Against this idea, Hess posits the ideas advocated by him—and by Marx: If one sees in the conditions, relations, and connections that give rise to a certain mode of production among men merely a reflection of these social conditions in human consciousness, only a spiritual nexus, then one sees in the abolition of these social conditions just the abolition of spiritual connections which are only reflected in the movements of the original...
...For an excellent resume of his thought, see Isaiah Berlin, "The Life and Opinions of Moses Hess," in his Against the Current (New York, 1980), pp...
...You will be surprised to hear that the nonillusory, practicable part of the economic ideals of Proudhon and his powerful party in France is now being carried out in England and that consequently England is now nearer to a proletarian revolution than the continent or even France...
...Hess goes on to suggest (p...
...Such stagnation cannot be the harbinger of a New Life, only the progenitor of more stagnation: All that you have told me about the Russian commune reinforces my view of the contemplative, ahistorical, stable nature of these [Slavonic] nations...
...True, in 1848-1849 France and Germany failed to produce viable revolutions—not because Europe was "exhausted" by some nebulous spiritual standards, but because economic infrastructures were not yet ripe for change and transformation...
...278-79...
...Notes ' The most extensive biography of Hess is Edmund Si lberner's Moses Hess: Geschichte seines Lebens (Leiden, 1966...
...Yet the alternative to France and Germany is not the stagnant Slavonic world, with its fossilized communes and autocracy, but the industrial development of England...
...Iskander" (Alexander) was Herzen's pseudonym...
...In society, just as anywhere else, the mode of production is the focus around which revolve all the modes of life: in the historical life of conscious beings, it is also the focus of all modes of consciousness...
...First and foremost, Hess expresses his criticism of what he calls Herzen's mysticism and his reluctance to address himself to the real, economic and social conditions of historical change...
...For Hess, the new elements of future society could not be introduced by the Slays, nor does the historical parallel with the barbarian invasions stand up to scrutiny...
...I know you are a revolutionary...
...For you, as a philosopher, the future hides in its womb innumerable possibilities...
...I admit that the Slays can turn our Europe into a modern Byzantium, into an occidental China—but they cannot make Europe into a social democratic republic, if Europe does not liberate itself...
...125-26...
...107-18...
...Donoso Cortes, Situation generale de l'Europe: Discours prononce le 30 Janvier a la Chambre des Deputes de l'Espagne, Paris, 1850...
...If you want to know the difference between your own ideological and our realistic or, if you wish, materialist view of history, compare your own assessment of French history from the July Revolution of 1830 to the June battles of 1848 (as you have described it in your recent letters) with Marx's judgment on this period [in his The Class Struggles in France 1848-1850, first published in serialized form and beginning] in the first number of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, Politisch-Okonomische Revue [edited by Marx himself in London...
...Briefwechsel, p. 256.] This, according to Hess, is the mistake of all those who lost faith in the revolution: those who gave up the hope of revolution are mistaken in that they view the revolution only from its theoretical and philosophical aspect...
...Hess to Herzen, February 1850, in Moses Hess, Briefwechsel, E. Silberner, ed...
...9 Finally, Hess compares Herzen to Proudhon and castigates him for a utopian vision of social development that abstracts from the realities of historical life: Had you perceived communism not as a Utopia, but in its political meaning, as a historical movement, as a proletarian revolution, as a battle of the proletariat for its emancipation from the domination of the bourgeoisie, as the striving of the workers to liberate themselves from their protectors and from the lords of their labor in order to organize their labor by themselves—had you, in one word, perceived communism as a class struggle...
...According to Hess, the conservatives—like Herzen himself—fail to understand this, hence their inverted world view...
...Briefwechsel, pp...
...This can be done, he writes in language obviously reminiscent of the concluding message of The Communist Manifesto, only by "those who have nothing to lose—neither spiritual nor material goods...
...Ideology is that mode of thinking which stands everything on its head...
...See also my "The New Jerusalem of Moses Hess," in Alkis Kontos, ed., Powers, Possessions, and Freedom: Essays in Honour of C. B. Macpherson (Toronto, 1979), pp...
...Nevertheless, he questions Herzen—on lines following Donoso Cortes's argument—as to whether the image of barbarian invasions is really the promise of future European salvation...
...In such fashion, one turns the tender flower of social life —i.e., morality and religion—into its root, the top of the pyramid is transformed into its base, and one imagines that one can reconstruct the old, already dissolved social relations by reconstructing the old spiritual connections...
...And as a Russian, you confront European history even with some animosity...
...But he is also a Russian, and to his Russian background Hess traces Herzen's assumption that the future belongs to the Slavonic people: But there is another element, beyond the philosophical, which distinguishes your mode of thought from mine...
...I, at least, cannot accept the idea of such a Slavonic invasion...
...8 Hess argues that such a view, based on the material analysis of real economic conditions, would focus attention not on Russia—but on England...
...261) that with the emergence of an economic crisis in England, a world crisis and a subsequent proletarian victory would follow...
...but, dear, dear friend, you may be mistaken about the aims of the revolution...
...In his speech, he claimed that Herzen brought out the inner truth of socialism—that socialism is really a modern form of barbarism, and he then called upon the people of Europe to defend themselves against this barbarian, socialist onslaught, delineated by Herzen...
...Where is there a similar element in Herzen's vision...
...After this reference to Marx, there follows a passage that was not included in the final version of the letter sent to Herzen...
...but as a Russian, you prophesy that the Slav family of nations will inherit the European one, because the latter is too old and too weak to regenerate itself from its own resources...
...The Russian village commune, which to Herzen signifies the pristine purity of Russian life, is to Hess a fossil...
...The next world-historical nation would be the Russian nation: primeval, young, and uncorrupted, carrying within itself a religious and social message of redemption, preserving within its institutions an ancient communitarian tradition...
...But I hope that history, which does not repeat itself, will spare us such a second, unabridged edition of the barbarian invasions...
...Briefwechsel, p. 245...
...Such a death of European civilization harbors no seeds of life, no renascence...
...I believe that Russia and the Slays cannot remain alien to the revolution just as England and North America cannot remain alien to it...
...it had no vigor, no regenerative potential...
...In his third letter to Herzen, written in late March or early April 1850, Hess again tries to 81 mitigate some of his harsh condemnation of Herzen's ideas by relating them to the discouraging conditions in Western Europe: I know quite well that only out of despair of a European revolution do you console yourself with your Slavonic illusions...
...After being active with Marx and Engels in the Rhineland in 1848-49, Hess found refuge in Paris, where he lived until his death in 1875...
...Hess refers here to an earlier work of his, Die europiiische Triarchie (1841), where in an Appendix called "Russian Politics" he warns against the dangers of a socialism imported from Russia (see Moses Hess, Ausgewdhlte Schriften, ed...
...Europe was old, sick, decadent...
...The disillusion was strongest among German radical revolutionaries...
...240-41...
...Out of this internationalist perspective he opposed Herzen's ethnocentric view of the future of socialism depending exclusively on a Russian revolution and its importation by force into Europe: The ultimate victory of the social revolution will not be one day's work, nor will it be the work of one nation or family of nations...
...I admit that there can be no free Europe without a free Russia...
...In Hess's words, "If one assumes that barbarians conquer an already civilized world, one has also to assume, following the laws of logic and history, that the conquerors adopt the spiritual as well as the material treasures of the conquered...
...H. Lademacher, Köln, 1962, pp...
...even there he was a moderating influence against the more extreme Blanquists and Bakuninists...
...In Russia, he continues, he sees only traits of "reactionary socialism...
...But they do show an insight that, besides giving us fresh material about the relationship between Hess and Marx, also foreshadows developments that became historical reality only many decades later...
...Only in the 1860s did he return to some sort of political activity in connection with the First International...
...March 1850, Briefwechsel, p. 253...
...You belong to a family of nations which has remained alien to the historical development of Europe: you are a Russian...
...The Hague, 1959), pp...
...Just as at the time of the decline of the 79 Roman Empire, redemption again will come from the East: ex Oriente lux...
...244-45...
...Briefwechsel, p. 253.] BUT HESS IS NOT CONTENT with merely criticizing Herzen's advocacy of a European revolution imported on Russian socialist bayonets: he also tries to suggest that there is, despite the defeat of 1848, a revolutionary hope in Europe itself—and in this exposition he moves very clearly to Marx's view of that time, stressing the economic basis of historical development...
...The lack of historical development in Russian society—for Herzen a sign of its uncorrupted nature—is for Hess's dialectical thinking proof of its stagnation...
...this man [Marx], the greatest genius of our movement, is not satisfied with the recognition given to him by all who justly know and honor his achievements...
...Out of Russia, unfortunately, no light can come—Russia itself will have to be emancipated through the power of Western technological and social development: If our revolution carries the seeds of a New World, and if our antagonistic conditions of production and property are the womb out of which there will arise those harmonious conditions which would put an end to all distinctions of class and race—then, my dear friend, these conditions will not be brought about, as you think, by the Slays with their communal arrangements...
...Only a Russian revolution, spreading westward, could transform Europe...
...Hess intended to publish his letters as a pamphlet, under the title Letters to Iskander,3 but they were not published in his lifetime and have only come to light relatively recently...
...213-51...
...its role in world history had already been accomplished...
...They tend to overlook the real, material base of political life—and in this, Herzen and those like him are similar to conservative thinkers, such as Donoso Cortes, who also were blind to economic realities...
...1 IN 1850, THE GERMAN EMIGRES were greatly excited by the appearance of a German translation of an anonymous pamphlet by Alexander Herzen, From the Other Shore.' Hess replied to this pamphlet, and his response brings out both his continued belief in the eventual victory of socialism, as well as his relationship to Marx's thought at that crucial period...
...rather, he demands a personal kind of submission which I, at least, am not ready to render to any human being" (Briefwechsel, p. 256...
...Some, like Arnold Ruge and Bruno Bauer, slowly slid into cooperation with conservative circles and reemerged, decades later, as spokesmen for Bismarckian politics...
...In a later letter to Herzen, not part of the "Letters to Iskander" series, Hess again maintains that Herzen's Russian patriotism clouds his vision (November 1851, Briefwechsel, pp...
...this was the dialectics of conquest and integration...
...In this passage Hess paints a very telling picture of Marx— and also brings out the ambiguity of his own personal relationship with him and the complexity of Marx's attitude to his colleagues: "It is such a terrible pity that...
...No "Apostle of the People" can sympathize with the idea of racial strife...
...But why do you want to make European freedom dependent upon Russian domination...
...Once the revolution breaks out...
...Briefwechsel, pp...
...Hess also questions Herzen on the validity of the equation of the barbarian invasions with his wishedfor future Russian invasion of Europe...
...In a speech made in the Spanish Chamber of Deputies and published in a French translation in Paris,' Donoso Cortes took up Herzen's historical parallel between the barbarian invasions and a future Russian socialist invasion of Europe...
...I know no other criterion for the evaluation of social life except that of social economy...
...Do not be mistaken, dear friend...
...he opposes Herzen's voluntarism and disregard for social analysis...
...Briefwechsel, p. 258...
...Briefwechsel, p. 256.] Hess's letters to Herzen were never published during his lifetime, and hence they had no impact on his contemporaries...
...But you lost hope so easily in the European revolution because you view it solely, or primarily, from its ideological side...
...6 The revolution, Hess concludes his first letter, will not be carried by one nation: he reiterates his earlier views, originally expressed in The European Triarchy, that no nation—neither the French, nor the Germans, nor the English—has a monopoly over the revolutionary future...
...Briefwechsel, p. 239.] Philosophy, Hess continues, can never suggest an alternative society: the proletariat, on the other hand, being at the center of the modern mode of production, can paint a new world on the canvas of its active consciousness...
...One of the more interesting reactions to the ideas expressed by Herzen in From the Other Shore came from the Spanish conservative thinker and statesman Donoso Cortes...
...But then he goes further: Herzen is, on the one hand, a philosopher, imbued with the European tradition...
...n his first letter to Herzen, written in February 1850, Hess expresses agreement with many of Herzen's general ideas, including the similarities he found between the early Christian apostles and the socialist revolutionaries.' Yet when he discusses Herzen's specific political and historical analysis, Hess disagrees with him sharply...
...As a philosopher, you do not want to project yourself into the future...
...Briefwechsel, p. 246.] The second letter of Hess to Herzen, written in March 1850, introduces the same theme from another aspect...
...In the post-1848 debate about the prospects This article—copyright © 1983 by Government in Opposition, Ltd.—is reprinted, with permission, from Government in Opposition (London), a quarterly journal of comparative politics, where it appeared with the assistance of the London School of Economics...
...The original drafts of these letters have been preserved, as has been one reply by Herzen...
...The ray of light which you discern beyond "the wave of the raging deluge" is not the rising morning star of a new day—it is nothing else but the Northern Light which illuminates the bleakness of an Eternal Night...
...It also sheds some fascinating light on his attitude toward Herzen's idea that socialism would conquer Europe from the East, from Russia...
...by those who have so deeply immersed themselves into the center of social life as to have been totally identified with it" (Briefwechsel, p. 242...
...Hess maintains that the philosophers cannot bring about the demise of the old society...
...I, at least, will do whatever I can to spare our part of the world from such a terrible catastrophe...
...as a Russian, the womb of the future harbors for you only a Slav invasion' Following Herzen's analogy with the decline of the Roman Empire, Hess maintains that the modern proletarians may indeed be the contemporary equivalent of the ancient barbarians— but he also hopes that they will bring about not only the destruction of capitalist civilization, but also its regeneration...
Vol. 33 • January 1986 • No. 1
