The Political Economy of Plekhanov

Abstract

About 1880, as the ‘Late Marx’ was emerging, the young Plekhanov was moving in an exactly contrary direction. He broke with his populist past, embraced a Marxism which incorporated central themes of the mature Marx, and began the process by which his ideas subsequently attained dominance in Russian revolutionary circles. The fact that he knew Marx’s own views on Russia to diverge from his own,¹ and that he received scant encouragement from Engels or other leaders of Marxism for many years after Marx’s death,² speaks for his intellectual confidence. Plekhanov’s theoretical abilities are attested by the fact that the general parameters of his system dominated Russian Marxism for over three decades. Menshevism was based firmly upon his Marxism, and none of its theorists ever approached him in intellectual stature.³ The brief flowering of ‘Legal Marxism’ in the 1890s was no less indebted to him.⁴ Even after Plekhanov’s break with Bolshevism in 1905 over the ‘arithmetic of revolution,’ Lenin still considered himself an adherent of his ‘algebra’ (see Chapter 11 below). Nor did the success of the October revolution, the theoretical principles of which were clearly contrary to those of Plekhanov (see Chapter 13 below), qualify Lenin’s admiration for his philosophical work.⁵ In the Soviet Union his texts have been accorded a prominent place among the intellectual foundations officially held to legitimise it.⁶