social democracy exercised a confusing influence upon Plehanov and the Russian Marxists.
In the Communist Manifesto Plehanov had discovered arguments for the political struggle and for the alliance with the liberals; he found here also an argument against mere economism (Russian economism was no novelty); the Communist Manifesto harmonised with the transition from the terrorism of the Narodnaja Volja to Marxism. The later phase of Marxism, however, was out of harmony with this transition, and this later phase therefore provided Plehanov's disciples with their arguments on behalf of economism, their arguments against political activity, against the duma, against the state in general.[1] None the less, Plehanov's disciples could discover arguments for politism also in Engel's writings during the latest of his evolutionary phases.
The establishment of the duma involved a number of theoretical and practical inconveniences for the Marxists. The first question they had to consider was whether they should recognise the duma or boycott that institution, and the answers they gave were divergent.
The agrarian question promptly came before the duma in a concrete practical form. The electoral system guaranteed the peasants a definite number of deputies, and in the duma the narodniki were able to discover whether they had been right in believing that ninety per cent of the peasants were socialistically inclined. The result of the elections was in the first place an argument against the narodniki, but the Marxists
- ↑ The distinction between the conceptions of the Communist Manifesto and those of the later phase of Marxism, are very well characterised in Engel's preface to the fifth edition (1591). Explaining the designation "communists," he says: "Those among the workers, on the other hand, who, convinced of the inadequacy of purely political revolutions, demanded a thoroughgoing transformation of society, spoke of themselves at that time as communists." Thus we see that "purely political revolutions" are contrasted with the thoroughgoing (i.e. communistic) "transformation of society" [not merely of the state]. In the manifesto, Marx and Engels declaim against economism. In the section on bourgeois socialism we read: "A second, less systematic but more practical form of socialism endeavoured to disincline the workers for any sort of revolutionary movement by the demonstration that no political change could be of any use to them, but only a change in the material conditions of life, in economic relationships." It is true that Russian economism was of a somewhat different character from the economism to which Marx and Engels were referring in the manifesto, for the former doctrine was the outcome of trade union organisation, and was in part the doctrine of those who contended that trade union organisation was the only thing which mattered; but "apolitical" syndicalism teaches us that trade unions can also cherish political and revolutionary aims.
