The two companion volumes to this book could each open on a reassurance: whatever one concludes about Plekhanov after 1903, the case for reading the texts does not depend on the verdict. Volume I collected the founding pamphlets of Russian Marxism, written before the split; Volume II collected the two philosophical masterworks, mostly finished before it. This third volume cannot borrow that reassurance, and the difference is the whole interest of the book. Everything in it was written after the break — "material written by him mainly between 1904 and 1913," as the editor's own first sentence says, writing of the Menshevik period that, in his dating, began at the end of 1903. This is the volume of Plekhanov the Menshevik. And it is also, by the plain testimony of the man whose party won, the volume of Plekhanov at his most useful. Lenin told cadres to study these particular writings. The double character this series has traced across the first two volumes — the Marxist philosopher and the political apostate — is not, here, a matter of before and after. It runs down the middle of the same years, the same books, and in places the same page.
The object in your hands is a set of turn-of-the-century Russian polemics in a new English dress. The Russian material dates from roughly 1904 to 1913; the translation is fresh — "First printing 1976," the copyright Progress Publishers' — so the book is a bicentennial-decade export of writing composed two generations earlier. It was prepared, like its companions, by the Institute of Philosophy of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR, and it carries a long introductory essay by A. Maslin and a substantial apparatus of factual notes. The contents are the record of a man fighting on every front at once. The centrepieces are Fundamental Problems of Marxism (1908), Plekhanov's compact statement of the whole system, and Materialismus Militans (1908–10), three open letters demolishing the Russian followers of Ernst Mach — the physicist-philosopher whose doctrine that the world is a bundle of our own sensations had become fashionable among Social-Democrats after the defeat of 1905. Around these sit On the So-Called Religious Seekings in Russia (1909), against the vogue for "god-building" among left intellectuals; a run of short, lethal review-essays on the neo-Kantian and positivist philosophers of the day — Petzoldt, Rickert, Windelband, Boutroux, Bergson, Guyau; two long studies of the utopian socialists; the essay From Idealism to Materialism on Hegel's radical heirs; a preface to Deborin's textbook of dialectical materialism; and the short, sharp On the Study of Philosophy. It is a formidable table of contents, and most of it is Plekhanov near the top of his powers.
Begin with the rescue, because it is large and it is specific. Materialismus Militans is Plekhanov doing exactly what Lenin was doing in the very same months — Lenin's own Materialism and Empirio-Criticism was written in 1908 and published in 1909 — against exactly the same opponents, Bogdanov and Lunacharsky and the other "Machists" who claimed to be modernising Marxism and were in fact dissolving it into idealism. The two men were, on this front, allies; and the writing is superb of its combative kind. Plekhanov refuses Bogdanov even the courtesy of the word "comrade": the two of them hold "two directly opposed world-outlooks," and "you are, in relation to me, not a comrade, but the most resolute and irreconcilable opponent." The argument beneath the invective is the durable materialist case that there is a world, and it was here before we were. "We are aware," he writes, "that at one time there were no people on our planet. And if there were no people, neither was there their experience. Yet the earth was there. And this means that it (also a thing-in-itself!) existed outside human experience." That sentence has not aged. It is the answer to every philosophy that makes the knowing mind the condition of the thing known, and Plekhanov presses it with a wit the translation preserves — against Bogdanov's claim that reality is only what people's coordinated experience agrees upon, he replies that on such a test hobgoblins are real too, since whole villages once agreed on them.
Fundamental Problems of Marxism is the other pillar, and it is where Plekhanov states, more clearly than almost anyone had in a short compass, what the materialist conception of history is for. It is a method, not a set of results: "not to the arithmetic of social development, but to its algebra; not to the causes of individual phenomena, but to how the discovery of those causes should be approached. And that means that the materialist explanation of history was primarily of a methodological significance." The dialectic he defends is not a formula to be recited but a way of catching reality in motion — where formal logic says "yea—yea and nay—nay," a body actually in motion "is in a given place and at the same time is not in it," and can be judged only by the other formula, "yea—nay and nay—yea." And the point of turning Hegel's dialectic materialist is not decorum but detonation: "Materialism puts dialectics 'the right way up' and thereby removes the mystical veil in which Hegel had it wrapped. By the very fact of this it brings to light the revolutionary character of dialectics." A reader who has been told that Soviet "diamat" was always a catechism should sit with these pages, which are the live thing the catechism was made from.
There is a passage in this volume that ought to embarrass its own publisher, and it is worth dwelling on. Against a certain Shulyatikov, who had tried to read every philosophical term as a coded name for a social class — Kant's "noumena," on this account, secretly meaning the bourgeoisie — Plekhanov turns the full force of his contempt on vulgar Marxism, the crude reduction of every idea directly to economics. To claim that all philosophical terms merely designate classes and their interests, he writes, "is to reduce an extremely important question to a simplicity that can only be characterised by the epithet: 'Suzdalian'. This word denotes neither a 'social class', nor a 'group', nor a 'nucleus', but simply a vast woodenheadedness." Economic development conditions the rest "in the last instance," he insists, quoting Engels' famous qualifier — but "in the last instance" concedes "the existence of many other intermediate 'instances', each of which influences all the others." This is Plekhanov defending the relative independence of ideas against the mechanical materialism that Soviet textbook philosophy would spend decades lapsing back into. The apparatus that files him as a deviationist is reprinting his defence of the very subtlety it so often lacked.
The essays on religion carry the same double gift — a materialist account that is also a genuine feeling for its object. On the So-Called Religious Seekings in Russia traces belief back to the helplessness of early societies before nature, and it does so with real learning and real humour. "The Greek philosopher Xenophanes was mistaken when he said that man always creates his god in his own image and likeness. No, at the beginning he creates his god in the image and likeness of an animal." When bourgeois society sets out to limit the power of kings, Plekhanov notes, its theology follows: it turns to a God whose power is "restricted on all sides by the laws of Nature. Deism is celestial parliamentarism." And against the "god-building" of Lunacharsky and the early Gorky — the attempt to dress socialism as a new religion of humanity — he is merciless without being coarse, borrowing a phrase to call the whole enterprise "the padded-jacket of modern despondency," a warm coat for intellectuals who had lost their nerve after 1905. This is the intellectual-historical generosity Volume II praised in Plekhanov's handling of Holbach and Helvétius, carried into a new decade: he rescues even the thinkers he demolishes, and he demolishes even the causes he half-admires. The short piece On the Study of Philosophy states the pedagogy behind it all. Workers should read, but read the right teachers: "Neither Mach nor Avenarius, neither Windelband nor Wundt, nor even Kant must lead us to the sanctuary of philosophical truth, but only Engels, Marx, Feuerbach, and Hegel. Only from these teachers can we learn what we need to know."
Now the frame, and here this volume gives the series its most instructive editor. Volume I's essay, by V. Fomina, narrated Plekhanov's fall in a few muted sentences: one line each for the war, for October, for the burial. Volume II's essay, by B. A. Chagin, did not narrate the fall at all — it ended the story in 1903, before the trouble began, and the words "1914" and "social-chauvinist" never appear in it. Maslin is the third variant, and at first he looks like the bravest of the three. He names the thing. "Plekhanov changed his position and, in 1914, went over entirely to opportunism and social-chauvinism, opposing the socialist revolution in Russia." That is more than Chagin conceded and blunter than Fomina; it puts the date and the charge on the page in the essay's second paragraph. A reader might think this the one volume that faces the break squarely.
It is not, and the way it draws back is the finding. Having named 1914, the essay stops there. No wartime writing of Plekhanov's is named, quoted, dated, or answered — not one line of the man who supported the Entente and denounced the revolution is set before the reader to be judged. The narration reaches the war and halts three years short of October: the words "October Revolution" do not occur anywhere in this volume, in any form. Plekhanov's death near Petrograd in 1918 is absent; the only 1918s in the book are the closing dates of St Petersburg magazines in the factual notes. And the cause assigned to the fall is, once again, external to the man's own thinking. His political "dissidence," Maslin writes, "may be explained primarily by his misunderstanding of the nature and peculiarities of the new historical epoch — the epoch of imperialism and proletarian revolutions." He did not decide; he failed to understand a period that acted upon him. This is Fomina's causal arrow — the West, the epoch, reformism, everything but Plekhanov — drawn once more.
What is new in Maslin, and worth naming precisely, is the device that lets the volume exist at all. Chagin sealed the politics off by ending the story; Maslin cannot end the story in 1903, because his volume is made of writing from 1904 to 1913, every page of it Menshevik by his own dating. So he partitions the man instead. "As Lenin said," he writes, "Plekhanov combined in himself radicalism in theory and opportunism in practice"; and again, "a change of his political views did not bring about an immediate, automatic, fundamental change of his philosophical world-outlook." Theory on one side, practice on the other, and a wall between them — so that a book of Menshevik-period philosophy can be presented as philosophy unspoiled by Menshevism. The partition is the permit under which the whole volume is published. It is also, as we shall see, exactly the joint at which Plekhanov's ablest critics broke him.
To the apparatus's real credit — and this series has recorded the same credit for both companion volumes — Maslin does not hide the philosophical errors. He flags Plekhanov's lapse toward agnosticism and his notorious "theory of hieroglyphs," the idea that our sensations are conventional signs rather than copies of things, notes that Plekhanov himself renounced it in 1905, and cites Lenin's Materialism and Empirio-Criticism against it by volume and page. (That hieroglyph error is a thread the whole edition follows: Volume I's notes flagged its 1892 form, Volume II's essay flagged its return in 1899, and here Maslin traces its recantation — three volumes tracking one mistake, honestly.) He records that Plekhanov overestimated the role of the geographical environment; that his "five-point formula" of base and superstructure has "serious shortcomings"; that he misread Marx's relation to Feuerbach. Each fault is named, dated, tied to a text the reader can turn to. This is argument, not excision, and set beside what the same publisher did to the historical record elsewhere in this catalogue it is a different and better order of editorial conduct.
But set that candour beside the political silence and the old asymmetry stands out sharper than ever. The philosophy gets a coroner's report; the politics gets a date and two labels. Plekhanov's mistaken theory of the state, his agnostic slips, his errors on Feuerbach — each earns a paragraph of specifics. His support for an imperialist war earns the single word "social-chauvinism," with no writing behind it; his opposition to the workers' revolution earns "opportunism," with no argument attached. And here Maslin's own text contains the fact that dissolves his partition. Discussing Fundamental Problems of Marxism, he concedes that in his Notes to that very book Plekhanov "relapsed into an opportunist position," leaning toward the Second International — arguing that Russia's productive forces were too undeveloped for a socialist revolution. So the politics is not, after all, walled off from the philosophy. It is in the philosophy, in the flagship text of the volume, at the exact point where the method is applied to Russia. The apparatus locates it there once, in a single sentence, and quarantines it everywhere else.
That single sentence is the door through which the reply tradition has always come, and this series has walked through it in both companion volumes. The economism was not a stain on Plekhanov's method; it was his method, drawn to its logical end. From the correct premise that Russia's coming revolution would be bourgeois in its tasks, Plekhanov deduced that its outcome must be a long capitalist development, and that the workers must therefore subordinate themselves and wait. Michael Löwy identified Trotsky's rejection of the economism he regarded as one of the essential traits of Plekhanov's Marxism as a founding premise of the theory of permanent revolution ("Trotsky 60 years on," International Viewpoint 324, September–October 2000). Ernest Mandel put the pedigree more bluntly still, answering Doug Jenness in Intercontinental Press (vol. 21 no. 15, 8 August 1983): the expectation of a long capitalist stage after the democratic revolution was, he argued, the old thesis of the whole of Russian Social-Democracy — first formulated by Plekhanov, reasserted in the party programme that Lenin and Plekhanov drafted jointly, and challenged before 1917 only by Trotsky, in 1905–06. The rigour that made Plekhanov lethal against a Bogdanov and the fatalism that left him stranded before 1917 were the same rigour, and Volume II said so in nearly these words. This volume simply supplies the smoking document — a philosophy book in which the author, applying his own algebra to his own country, reads off the wrong future.
Which is why Maslin's partition — radicalism in theory, opportunism in practice, and a wall between — will not hold, and why the sharpest answer to it is the oldest. Trotsky wrote his note on Plekhanov in April 1922, four years after the man's death (translated in the American Fourth International, vol. 4 no. 3, whole no. 31, March 1943). It is not a demolition; it grants that Plekhanov "introduced" historical materialism "into Russian life." But where Maslin makes the theory-and-practice split a container that keeps the philosophy safe, Trotsky makes the very same split the disease: Plekhanov was a theoretician without a party and without practice, and "this disturbance of the balance between theory and practice, which arose from the whole circumstances of Plekhanov's life, proved fatal for him." Maslin's containment and Trotsky's diagnosis point at the identical fracture; they differ only on whether it can be sealed off or is the wound itself. Trotsky thought it the wound, and he still claimed the man: "The great Plekhanov, the true one, belongs entirely and wholly to us."
Lenin's own words are the frame the whole series keeps returning to, and this volume is where they bite hardest. Maslin quotes Lenin from 1908 — Plekhanov was "the only Marxist in the international Social-Democratic movement to criticise the incredible platitudes of the revisionists from the standpoint of consistent dialectical materialism" — and from May 1914, on the eve of the collapse: "We are sorry for Plekhanov.... he deserves a better fate." And it was Lenin who, three years after Plekhanov's death, told a generation of Communists — in "Once Again on the Trade Unions" (1921) — that they could not become real Marxists "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." That instruction is the reason this volume exists. But Lenin drew his distinction between Plekhanov's theory and his politics in the heat of a living fight, as a fighter's judgment about which weapons to keep from a fallen enemy. Maslin freezes that living judgment into a filing system. The same volume that lets Lenin praise the philosophy also lets Lenin note, in a line Maslin honestly reprints, that "Plekhanov in his criticism of Machism was less concerned with refuting Mach than with dealing a factional blow at Bolshevism." Even the alliance was factional. Even here, on the one front where Plekhanov and Lenin stood together, the Menshevik was fighting the Bolsheviks with his left hand. Theory and practice were never in separate rooms.
So read the book, and read it for the philosophy first — for Materialismus Militans, which is the best short demonstration Progress ever exported of what a materialist takes apart an idealist fashion, and for Fundamental Problems of Marxism, which states the method that the man could not, in the end, apply to his own moment. Then read Maslin's essay, and read it as the third and most revealing of this edition's three strategies for keeping an indispensable Menshevik in print. Fomina muted the fall; Chagin removed it; Maslin alone names the year 1914 out loud — and he is the one editor who had to find a new device, because his is the one volume where the great philosophy and the political apostasy are demonstrably the same man, working in the same years, sometimes in the same book. His answer was to cut Plekhanov in two lengthwise and hand the reader only the theoretical half. The book, as in both companion volumes, is more honest than its frame. It prints the philosophy and the fatal deduction side by side, on facing pages, and trusts no one to notice that they were written by one hand.