Marx and Russia

The question of Marx’s analysis of Russia is both complex and extremely controversial, particularly in light of the events of the twentieth century. My interpretation of the relationship between Marx and Russia will distance itself from two opposed readings that, in my view, are both problematic and bear little fruit. The first, proper to ‘traditional’ Marxism, consists of an underestimation of the role of Russia, and the insistence that it was substantially irrelevant to Marx, given that it was a peripheral country that was still not developed in a capitalist sense and was thus unable to reach communist revolution before the capitalist mode of production had fully been developed. Here, two key elements of Marx’s reflection are welded together: both an underestimation of the role of Russia, and the construction of a mechanical schema for the transition from capitalism to communism holding that the existence of a developed capitalist structure, such as was then missing in Russia, was the condition of possibility of communism. The communist revolution would thus only be able to take place in countries with advanced capitalist orders such as England and other European states. In recent years other ‘post-Marxist’ approaches have integrated Marx’s position with postcolonial studies in a perspective critical with regard to any Western ‘grand narrative’, pervaded with the spirit of colonialism. This outlook attributes particular importance to the Russian situation, in that this country had still not suffered the ‘labour pains’ of the birth of the capitalist mode of production. As such, it prefigured the possibility of a transition from the rural community to communism without first having to go through the stages of capitalism. This view exalts the characteristics of the rural commune, held to be superior to capitalist modernity.