The companion to this book made a claim that has to be qualified for the second volume before anything else is said: that whatever one concludes about Plekhanov after 1903, the case for reading the texts does not depend on the verdict. That was true of Volume I, which collected the founding pamphlets of Russian Marxism. It is even truer here, because Volume II contains the two works on which Plekhanov's standing as a philosopher — as against a pamphleteer or a party leader — actually rests. Everything else in the series can be argued over. These two cannot. On the Question of the Individual's Role in History, better known in English simply as The Role of the Individual in History, and the Essays on the History of Materialism — on Holbach, Helvétius and Marx — are the works a reader who has heard the name Plekhanov and wants to know why has been sent to for a century. They are printed here complete, in Julius Katzer's 1976 translation, and for most English readers this remains where they live.
The rest of the volume is a running battle. It gathers Plekhanov's writings of the later 1890s and the first years of the new century — the second half of the phase Volume I opened — and its enemy has changed. Volume I fought the Narodniks (Populists), who denied that Russia would take the capitalist road at all. Volume II fights the revisionists, who accepted Marxism and then set about hollowing it out from within: Eduard Bernstein in Germany, calling the movement back to Kant; Conrad Schmidt, Struve, Tugan-Baranovsky and Bulgakov, the Russian "legal Marxists" who wanted the economics without the dialectics; and behind them the neo-Kantian professors. The titles read like a duellist's log — Bernstein and Materialism, Cant Against Kant, or Herr Bernstein's Will and Testament, Conrad Schmidt Versus Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Materialism or Kantianism, A Critique of Our Critics. This is Plekhanov as the appointed guardian of Marxist orthodoxy against its friendly dismantlers, and much of the writing is superb of its kind: quick, contemptuous, learned, unfair in the way a good prosecutor is unfair.
A word on what the book in your hands actually is, because the series exists to get this right. The Russian texts are Plekhanov's own, composed between roughly 1893 and 1903. The English is new — "First printing 1976," the translation copyright Progress Publishers' — so the object is a set of turn-of-the-century polemics in a bicentennial-year jacket. What sits in front of them, and what this introduction is finally about, is the editorial frame: a long essay by B. A. Chagin and a substantial apparatus of notes. Chagin's own footnotes cite the 1974 Volume I, so the frame was at least finalised in the mid-1970s, whatever it owes to the earlier Russian editions. The frame is not Plekhanov. It is the Soviet state deciding, in the Brezhnev years, how the one indispensable Menshevik should be presented to the world, and its decisions are legible.
Begin with the philosophy, because the philosophy is the reason to own the book. The Role of the Individual in History is Plekhanov's answer to a question the Narodnik subjectivists had botched and their positivist opponents had answered by abolishing it: if history is law-governed, what is left for the great man to do? Plekhanov refuses both exits. Against the subjectivists, who made "critically thinking individuals" a free-standing force pulling history along, and against the mechanists who reduced the individual to une quantité négligeable, he sets a dialectical resolution: "To sacrifice the thesis to the antithesis is just as groundless as forgetting the antithesis for the sake of the thesis. The correct point of view will be found only when we are able to blend in a synthesis the elements of truth they contain." The synthesis is worked out through a long, delighted excursion into eighteenth-century France — Louis XV, Madame de Pompadour, the incompetent generals of the Seven Years War, the deaths of Mirabeau and Robespierre, the "good sword" the Directory needed and found in Bonaparte. The play of accident is granted its due: had a brick fallen on Robespierre in January 1793, "his place would of course have been taken by somebody else." Yet the general trend holds. "Whatever the qualities of a particular individual may be, he cannot eliminate the given economic relations if the latter correspond to a definite state of the productive forces." The great man is neither the author of his age nor its puppet:
A great man is great, not in his personal features lending an individual complexion to historic events but in his possession of traits which make him the most capable of serving his time's great social needs.... In his well-known book on heroes and hero worship, Carlyle calls great men Beginners. This is a very apt description. A great man is precisely a Beginner because he sees farther than others do and his desires are stronger than in others.... He is a hero, not in the sense that he can halt or change the natural course of things, but in the sense that his activities are the conscious and free expression of that necessary and unconscious course.
This is first-rate. It is also, as we shall see, the sentence Plekhanov's own end would test to destruction — but that is for later. Note only, for now, how directly the essay carries forward Volume I. There, Plekhanov's demolition of the Narodnik worship of the hero was a pamphleteer's point scored against a Russian sect. Here it becomes a general theory of the relation between necessity and human agency, and the Russian "subjectivists" are only one instance of a confusion he tracks through Carlyle, the French historians of the Restoration, and the German philistines. The polemic of the 1880s has matured into philosophy.
The Essays on the History of Materialism are the volume's other genuine contribution, and their method is one this series has learned to value: Plekhanov rescues thinkers his own tradition had been content to sneer at. Holbach and Helvétius, he insists, are "in many respects outstanding thinkers who have not been duly appreciated to this day," and he means to appreciate them properly — not as quaint mechanists to be patronised on the way to Marx, but as men who reached, with the tools they had, for a materialist account of morals and society, and failed only where their eighteenth-century method forced them to fail. When he faults Helvétius for reducing every human motive to the pursuit of sensual pleasure, the fault is located precisely, in the metaphysical structure of the man's thought, and the credit is returned in the same breath: "it is necessary merely to understand the 'Spirit' of dialectical materialism to see that the latter is insured against the errors made by its metaphysical forerunner." This is how intellectual history is supposed to be written, and it is the same generosity of attention that makes the Role of the Individual worth reading — an attention conspicuously absent, as we shall find, from the way the Soviet edition treats Plekhanov himself.
The anti-revisionist polemics are lower art but often lethal. Against Bernstein, who had pronounced the dialectic an "almost anthropological" survival, Plekhanov is merciless about a critic who has never read the author he demolishes: Bernstein "has nowhere to get" his proofs "from, since he himself has not made so bold as to assert that he has ever studied Hegel." Against the whole revisionist drift he is sharper still, and here a passage deserves to be quoted at length, because the reader who reaches the end of this introduction will want to have it in mind. Plekhanov, in A Critique of Our Critics, is diagnosing why Bernstein has not been expelled from the German party despite deserting its programme:
For reasons we cannot go into in this article, opportunism has won many supporters in the ranks of Social-Democracy in various countries. This spread of opportunism presents the main danger threatening it today. Social-Democrats who have remained loyal to the revolutionary spirit of their programme ... will be making an irreparable mistake if they do not take timely and decisive action to counter the danger.
Chagin's own introduction records that Plekhanov "demanded Bernstein's expulsion from the Social-Democratic Party." Hold that thought.
The longest of the polemics, A Critique of Our Critics, is where Plekhanov's historical materialism is on its fullest and most rigorous display, and it repays attention for a reason that only becomes clear at the end of this introduction. Answering Struve, Plekhanov drives everything back to a single relation: "the contradiction between society's productive forces and its property relations has always been focal in Marx's theory of social development," he insists, quoting the famous Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy — no social order perishes "before all the productive forces for which it is sufficient have been developed" — as the master key. He is careful, and the care is genuine philosophy: he distinguishes real historical materialism from the shallow "economic materialism" of the day, noting sharply that "economic materialism does not yet preclude historical idealism," since a writer can grant the economy first place and still treat that economy as the product of human ideas. It is a fine discrimination, and it shows Plekhanov at the height of his powers. It also shows the habit of mind that the reply tradition would name as his undoing. To read every question, including the character of a coming revolution, off the "definite state of the productive forces" is a discipline that keeps a philosopher honest against a Struve and can leave a politician stranded before a February. The rigour and the limitation are the same rigour.
Now the frame. Chagin's essay is titled "G. V. Plekhanov's Defence and Substantiation of Dialectical and Historical Materialism in the Struggle Against Revisionism," and the title is the argument: Plekhanov is defined by a struggle, and the struggle is against revisionism, the word that in this catalogue does the work "opportunism" does elsewhere — the interchangeable label under which a heretic is filed. The essay is intelligent and, on the philosophy, scrupulous to a degree that has to be credited. It is also built to perform a specific operation, and the operation is visible the moment one asks where it stops.
It stops in 1903. The opening sentence dates Plekhanov's achievement to "the first two decades of his Marxist activities (1883–1903)," and the essay honours that boundary with a rigour it applies to nothing else. The turn is narrated in three short paragraphs near the close: on the eve of the Second Congress Plekhanov "showed certain departures from revolutionary Marxism in political questions," "overestimated the liberal bourgeoisie's role," and so "assuming the position of Menshevism — that opportunist trend in the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party." Then the essay simply ends, on Lenin. There is no First World War in it. There is no 1917. There is no death. The words "social-chauvinist" and "1914" do not occur anywhere in Chagin's essay — in the whole volume they appear only in the Name Index, attached to other men. Plekhanov's support for the Entente, his public break with Lenin, his denunciation of October as a violation of the laws of history, his death near Petrograd in 1918 — none of it is present. The man is a figure of 1883 to 1903, and the clock is stopped at the exact year the trouble starts.
This is worth setting beside the companion volume, because the two editions handle the same catastrophe differently and the difference is instructive. Volume I's essay, by V. Fomina, at least narrated the fall: it gave a sentence each to the war, to October, to the burial near Belinsky, muting the arguments but admitting the events. Chagin does not narrate the fall at all. He removes it. Where Fomina built a bell curve that rose and declined, Chagin draws a line that rises and is cut off. It is the more complete containment of the two.
And the technique is exposed by a single asymmetry. Chagin is not squeamish about Plekhanov's errors as such. On the contrary, he catalogues the philosophical ones with real forensic care. He records that Plekhanov gave "an erroneous proposition regarding the origin and essence of the state," misreading Antonio Labriola's definition of the state as class domination. He records that Plekhanov "made concessions to agnosticism," that "in his polemic with Bernstein and Schmidt, he gave an erroneous formulation of the incognisability of the essence of matter," and that in "Materialism Yet Again" (1899) he "again advanced certain propositions in the spirit of the 'theory of hieroglyphics'" — the notion that our sensations are mere signs, not copies, of the external world, the very error Lenin would later single out in Materialism and Empirio-Criticism. Each philosophical fault is named, dated, and tied to a specific text. This is honest, and it is more than honest: it is the apparatus admitting, against interest, that its hero's epistemology was in places defective. The reader can look the errors up and judge them.
Set that beside the political ending and the operation stands revealed. The philosophy gets a coroner's report; the politics gets a full stop. Plekhanov's mistaken theory of the state earns a paragraph of specifics; his support of an imperialist war earns nothing, because it is not mentioned; his opposition to the workers' revolution earns nothing, because the essay has already closed. The reader is handed everything needed to weigh the "theory of hieroglyphics" and nothing whatever with which to weigh 1917. That is not an oversight in an essay this careful. It is the design. The philosophical Plekhanov can be examined precisely because the political Plekhanov has been sealed off — reduced to two labels, "opportunism" and "Menshevism," with no argument attached and no biography allowed to run past the point where the labels would have to be cashed.
The apparatus does, in fairness, keep its editorial candour where the philosophy is concerned, and this deserves the same credit the companion volume earned. The notes flag Plekhanov's agnostic slips rather than quietly correcting them; they let his errors on the state stand in the text and dissent beneath. This is argument, not excision, and set against what the same publisher did to the historical record elsewhere in this catalogue it is a different order of editorial conduct. The point is not that the editors lie. They do not. The point is what a scrupulous editor can nonetheless be made to leave out.
There is an irony the frame cannot absorb, and it sits in the volume's own pages. In 1898 Plekhanov demanded the expulsion of Bernstein and warned that "the spread of opportunism presents the main danger threatening" Social-Democracy. In Chagin's essay, five years further on, Plekhanov has himself arrived at "the position of Menshevism — that opportunist trend." The prosecutor of opportunism is convicted, by the same word, of the same crime. The book prints the indictment; the introduction files the same charge against the man who drew it up; and no one remarks on the symmetry. As in the companion volume, where an 1883 pamphlet predicting rule by a "socialist caste" was printed in Moscow without comment, Volume II is more candid than the essay that frames it — it simply lays the evidence out and trusts no one to connect it.
What the frame withholds, the reply tradition supplied, and for this volume it supplied something better than a verdict: it supplied the argument, and located it inside Plekhanov's own method rather than outside it. The essential text is Trotsky's "Three Concepts of the Russian Revolution," written in 1940 for the suppressed biography of Stalin and printed in the American Fourth International, vol. 3 no. 11, November 1942. It is not a denunciation. It credits Plekhanov with founding the entire framework: he "established as long ago as the early eighties ... that Russia had no reason whatever to expect a privileged path of development," that "she would have to pass through the purgatory of capitalism." And it insists — against Chagin's tidy quarantine of "Menshevism" as a deviation — that the premise was common property: "Within these limits Lenin followed Plekhanov. The bourgeois character of the revolution served both factions of the Russian Social Democracy as their starting point." The break was not that Plekhanov held a false theory Lenin never touched. It was what Plekhanov deduced from a theory Lenin shared: that because the coming revolution was bourgeois, the proletariat must subordinate itself to the liberal bourgeoisie and postpone its own power to a distant future. From that deduction flowed the tactic Trotsky quotes with contempt — "We must cherish the support of non-proletarian parties ... and not repel them from us by tactless actions" — and against it Trotsky's judgement is exact and, once made, unanswerable: "By monotonous preachments of this sort, the philosopher of Marxism indicated that the living dynamics of society was unattainable to him." The economism was not a stain on the method. It was the method, drawn to its logical end.
This is where the rescue and the tragedy meet, and where reading the volume closely pays a dividend no summary can. The Role of the Individual in History teaches that the great man is the one who "sees farther than others do," whose gift is to grasp "his time's great social needs" and assume "the initiative in meeting those needs." By that measure — Plekhanov's own — 1917 is the moment his theory indicts its author. The social need was there; a Beginner was required; and the founder of Russian Marxism, the man who had taught a generation how to read history, could not see the need his own moment had thrown up, and set himself against the men who could. His finest instrument, the essay in this very book, is the one that convicts him. The companion volume's reply drew on Trotsky's 1922 Note on Plekhanov and on the later writers — Löwy and Mandel — who traced the theory of permanent revolution to a break with "the economism ... of Plekhanov's Marxism." That thread is there; this volume simply carries it into the concrete of 1905 and 1917, where the abstract deduction became a living tactic and failed.
So read the book — read it for the two masterworks first, then for the polemics, which are the best exhibition Progress ever exported of what a Marxist demolition of neo-Kantian revisionism looks like. Then read Chagin's essay, but read it for what it is: not an account of Plekhanov, but a demonstration of how a state that could not do without him kept him by cutting him in half. It gives the reader every tool to judge his epistemology and none to judge his politics, and it does so by the simple, unimprovable device of ending the story in 1903. Lenin's own words, which Chagin quotes as his last line, are the perfect cover for the operation: "you cannot hope to become a real, intelligent Communist without making a study — and I mean study — of all of Plekhanov's philosophical writings, because nothing better has been written on Marxism anywhere in the world." It is true, and it is why the book exists. It is also, placed where Chagin places it, the sentence that lets the war and the revolution go unmentioned — the encomium doing the work of the epitaph the editors declined to write.