The Thinking Reed

What I have here called ‘legal Marxism’ is diverse. In the first place we find in this category a right wing, consisting of those whose views could be described as Social Democratic or technocratic. When publishing their works legally they doubtless have to give them a ‘Marxist look’. As an example of a technocrat one may take V. Lukin. Generally speaking, the Institute for Study of the USA and Canada is a place where openly pro-American and technocratic attitudes predominate. However, the representatives of this trend are the most loyal to the statocracy and restrained in their criticism. Also among the legal Marxists there is a neo-Communist centre — G. Vodolazov or M. Cheshkov — and an extreme left wing, close to K. Maydannik, This schema does not exhaust the differences among them; nevertheless, the existence of a common problematic and the similarity between many of their chief conclusions enables us to speak of legal Marxism as a single entity.

Legal Marxism proved able to raise and answer a number of historico-social questions. Above all it was necessary to look into the essence and history of socialist doctrine. An important consideration was that the big question always remained ‘outside the frame’: How did it happen that, under the slogan of emancipation of labour and amid talk about ‘socialist construction’, we arrived at totalitarianism? This is the question of questions and although it is never even mentioned in so many words, it determines all the other questions. Whether writers realize this or not does not matter. A general scientific context arises which no serious scholar can avoid. The content of this scientific context consists precisely of the ‘accursed’ questions of our time, the most acute and painful social problems, and there is no getting away from them. We have to keep on coming back to them so long as life has not set new tasks before us. For this reason one can well understand A. Tsipko’s confidence when he wrote, at the end of his book, that the necessary conclusions ‘will be drawn by the reader for himself’.65

The question of socialism thus became very acute. It was necessary to analyse the history of the struggle for socialism in order to discover the roots of the ‘totalitarian degeneration’. In the seventies and eighties it was already not enough merely to say that Stalinism was inimical to Marxism: one had to track down the ideological and historical roots of Stalinism and at the same time discover the spiritual foundations, the general principles for overcoming it. For both purposes it was necessary to study the history of socialism.

What has especially attracted researchers’ interest is the concept of utopia. One can read about this in Tsipko’s Optimizm istorii, G. Vodolazov’s Ot Chernyshevskogo k Plekhanovu, Yu. Kagarlitsky’s Chto takoe fantastika? and many other books. As an example, I will take Tsipko’s writings. It has to be said that in them, as also in Vodolazov’s, we encounter some highly tendentious appraisals of certain Western thinkers. It is difficult to make out whether this is a gesture of submission to the censors or whether the two authors sincerely do not accept ideas which lie outside the framework of the ‘classical’ Marxism of the beginning of this century. However Tsipko, and M. Barg before him, raised a very pointed question: What criterion must be used to decide whether certain ideas are or are not ‘socialist’?66 According to Tsipko, ‘the criterion for the socialist character of an idea has to be sought, above all, in the degree of humanism’,67 and there can be no question of socialism where there is no humanist ideal of society. This ideal is not an ‘ultimate aim’ but accompanies the movement, becoming perfected and changing at each stage. Engels wrote that socialists ‘have no ultimate aim. We are for constant, uninterrupted development and have no intention of dictating to mankind any definite laws.’68 Tsipko notes that Marx ascribed enormous importance to trying to ‘safeguard the humanist essence’ of his philosophy.69 For this reason the democratic ideal was necessary to him, because it enables one to choose the means and tasks of the current moment and establish a criterion for self-appraisal. Forgetting the humanist ideal of Marxism or transforming it into a formal ‘ultimate aim’ (which, as we know, was what happened in the Communist movement in the 1920s) can mean that ‘the means of socialism are brought into contradiction with its aim, and thereby lose their “socialist” character.’70 Such a breach between the ideal and the means is a constant danger for any revolutionary movement and an effort to overcome it was made by Marxism, which ‘from the outset linked, in its teaching, revolutionary methods with the humanist ideal of the genuine emancipation of mankind’.71