‘Legal Marxism’¶
Core Argument¶
Digest: ‘Legal Marxism’
This chapter anatomises the peculiar hybrid of ‘Legal Marxism’ that flourished in Russia following the death of Alexander III in 1894. The core argument is that a layer of bourgeois intellectuals, attracted to Marxism as a socio-historical theory but repelled by its revolutionary class content, produced a bowdlerised, academic distortion of Marxism that served the interests of the nascent bourgeoisie rather than the proletariat. The chapter opens with a devastating vignette: Nicholas II’s contemptuous dismissal of the Zemstvo liberals’ petition for political participation, branding their aspirations “senseless dreams”. This episode is presented as emblematic of the liberals’ utter impotence and cowardice, setting the stage for the intellectual retreat of the bourgeoisie into spiritualism, mysticism, and ‘art for art’s sake’ — a farcical repetition, the chapter contends, of the earlier Narodnik tragedy.
The key claim is that Legal Marxism, represented by figures such as P.B. Struve, M.I. Tugan-Baranovsky, S.N. Bulgakov, and N.A. Berdyayev, constituted a “strange hybrid monstrosity”. These figures provided money, published Marxist literature in watered-down form in legal journals like Novoe Slovo, and even wrote the manifesto of the first congress of the RSDLP. Yet their Marxism was “anaemic and emasculated”, a “decaffeinated” version lacking revolutionary vitality. The chapter draws on Krupskaya’s memoirs to characterise Struve as incapable of underground work, flattered to be consulted but never truly of the party. The theoretical weakness is located in their rejection of dialectics in favour of Neo-Kantian philosophy, producing a lifeless, mechanical caricature of Marxism.
The chapter’s polemical thrust is directed against the underlying political logic of Legal Marxism: that Russia’s backwardness necessitated reliance on progressive bourgeois liberals for a democratic revolution, with socialism relegated to a distant theoretical prospect. This is identified as the embryonic form of both Menshevism and Stalinism — the same theory of class collaboration and reformism. The chapter counterposes Engels’s dialectical formulation from his 1894 afterword to On Social Relations in Russia: the Russian Revolution, even on a bourgeois-democratic basis, would impel the European proletarian revolution, which would in turn enable Russia to proceed from semi-feudal conditions to communism. This revolutionary dialectics, where cause becomes effect and effect cause, is set against the formal logic of ‘evolution’ espoused by the Legal Marxists. The chapter concludes with Struve’s own 1898 Manifesto, which condemned the Russian bourgeoisie in terms that became an ironic epitaph for its author, who later joined the Cadet Party and ended as a White émigré.