The Thinking Reed

Within the traditional structure of historical materialism there is no place for a modern social system which has an evolutionary trajectory other than capitalism and which is not simply an earlier or later stage along the same route.102

Since Kautsky’s time Marxists had perceived history as a kind of unilinear process in which social formations replace each other in strict order of succession. Marx must be given credit for never having said this, but Kautsky’s interpretation of his ideas could be considered quite admissible from the standpoint of the inner logic of Marx’s materialism (which does not mean that Kautsky’s version was the only one possible). Experience in our century has compelled us to start thinking once more about the limitedness of such a conception of history, and Gurevich’s book Problemy genezisa feodalizma v Zapadnoy Evrope (1970) was the most interesting and strikingly successful attempt to overcome the unilinearity of ‘classical’ Marxism. Gurevich showed that feudalism was by no means the inevitable outcome of the development of slave-owning society, but arose in concrete and highly specific historico-social circumstances. Thereby he raised the question of the possibility that more than one mode of production can exist on the basis of the same level of development of the productive forces.103

Naturally, this book was furiously attacked by the dogmatists, who charged it with all the mortal sins. Some of them were particularly angry about those passages in it where they perceived hints at our own time, such as: ‘The present-day conception of freedom presumes independence from anybody whatsoever.’104 The accusation was brought against Gurevich that ‘essentially, he is unwilling to take account of the Marxist-Leninist teaching on socioeconomic formations.’

105 Although the book had been written as a textbook for students, it was not accorded that honourable status. However, it was not withdrawn from the libraries, and despite all warnings it became classical material on which a new generation of Marxist historians was raised. Thus problems of medieval history can, with us, prove topical and even politically pointed.

To the pragmatic, utilitarian and conjunctural approach to history,’ declared the contributors to Gefter’s symposium,

we oppose not pretended neutrality and hypocritical indifference, but concern to obtain scientific truth and serve the cause of progress, the twofold task which constitutes the heart and meaning of the historical form of mankind’s cognition of itself: the extraction of experience, and learning from the lessons of the near and distant past.106

In his writings Gefter has done much to show the specific character of Russian capitalism — namely, its barbarousness. He has examined in detail the question of the presence of several different economic structures in Russia. This was not merely a matter of technological backwardness and insufficient development of industry, but of the specifics of the structure of Russian capitalism itself — of its barbarousness. It was not a poorly developed capitalist structure but a structure which, in its own way, was even highly developed, but of a different type from elsewhere. As a result of his study of this phenomenon Gefter came to the conclusion: as the capitalism was, so was the revolution. Socialist revolution was impossible where what still needed to be done was the ‘clearing’ of society by putting an end to the multiplicity of economic structures within it. Further conclusions inevitably follow. Stalinism fulfilled this function very well indeed. Not only was the country industrialized but a comparatively more up-to-date social structure was created, with an advanced degree of proletarianization of the population and the predominance of wage-labour relations, and without patriarchal forms of exploitation. Stalinism was a modernizing despotism — and here we come back to Vodolazov’s problem of the ‘simple’ totalitarian solution. True, variety of economic structures has been re-established at a new level in the form of the contradiction between the state-run economy and the black market, but that is another question…