The Icon and the Axe

Plekhanov begins his pamphlet of 1883 by praising the populist tradition for its "practical" orientation in going "among the people" and leading them into a "conscious political struggle."41 However, he insists that such a struggle will fail unless based on "scientific socialism" and above all on the repudiation of the anarchistic romanticism and abstract moralism of Proudhon, "the French Kant."42 A rational understanding of economic development is indispensable for those who seek revolutionary political-change. He returns regularly to this theme, most effectively in his long essay "Socialism and Anarchism," where he challenges the implicit populist idea that these two social philosophies are in some sense complementary. Socialism is the necessary form which social life must take in a modern society where the means of production have been socialized. Anarchism is an irrational form of protest against these processes. Plekhanov and his "liberation of labor" organization were the first important group of Russians to become familiar with the German Social Democratic tradition, with its emphasis on ordered progress; and they shared some of the German con-

tempt for anarchism, which was at best a "bourgeois sport" and at worst an invitation to irrationalism of all kinds:

In the name of revolution anarchists serve the cause of reaction; in the name of morality they encourage the most immoral actions; in the name of individual freedom they trample underfoot the rights of their neighbors.43

Marxism provides the theoretical basis for the revolutionary movement in Russia as elsewhere by providing an objective science of society and history. In contrast to the dualism of the populists, which was unable to "build a bridge across this seemingly bottomless abyss"44 between noble ideals and harsh realities, Plekhanov's philosophy is totally monistic. The material world alone is real, he proclaims repeatedly in a series of studies on materialism that was climaxed by his most influential book (and the only one published in Russia prior to the revolution), On the Question of the Development of the Monistic View of History: In Defence of Materialism. Absolute objectivity is possible, because "the criterion of truth lies not in me, but in the relations which exist outside of me."43

Plekhanov thus offered to a new generation of radical thinkers a monistic, objective philosophy that would liberate them from schism and subjectivity. As distinct from classical materialism of France in the eighteenth century (and Russia in the 1860's), Plekhanov's materialism contained a built-in guarantee of revolutionary change, for it is "historical" or "dialectic" materialism. Following Marx, it contends that the material world is in a state of motion and conflict and that the liberation of all humanity will inevitably come out of the clash of opposing forces in the material world. The driving forces in human society are social classes; and the social class to whom the future ultimately belongs is the proletariat.

As early as his 1884 pamphlet, "Our Differences," Plekhanov bluntly insisted that Russia was already in a capitalist stage of development. It was irrelevant to him whether private or state capitalism was controlling the economy; the practical result was that a new urban proletariat was coming into being. This class-rather than the demagogic and self-important intelligentsia or the confused and primitive peasantry-was the true bearer of progress in Russia. The proletariat had a practical familiarity with the tools of material progress and would not be so easily misled by demagogic talk of a "people's will." The growth of a proletariat was historically inevitable, and the old communal forms of organization no longer had any realistic potential for serving as socialist alternatives to the pattern of economic development which Marx had outlined in Capital. In his consistent attempt to "appeal to reason, not feelings," Plekhanov insisted that the

Russian revolutionary movement must effect an "unconditional break with its present theories" by accepting "a revolutionary theory" rather than "theories of revolutionaries."48 The program of the Liberation of Labor group urges not the dissolution of other radical groups but rather that the revolutionary struggle be fortified by a group recognizing the importance of "organizing a Russian workers' socialist party" and acknowledging the "international character of the present-day working-class movement."47