Communications

Russia: Methods of Analysis

In his article (DISSENT, Summer 1954) Mr. Deutscher asks whether a higher level of civilization corresponds to a higher level of economic development and whether a mass increase in literacy induces progress toward democracy. To such general questions, general answers may be given. But they are bound to be either arbitrary or skeptical in tone, and in both cases sterile. As against such generalizations, which were the pet prejudices of bourgeois liberalism in the nineteenth century, Marx —I turn to him since Mr. Deutscher speaks in his name—stressed the need to describe historical movements in their specific contexts. What Marx looked for was not generalities about capital formation, but an historical analysis of primitive accumulation as the path by which in Western Europe the capitalist order of economy emerged from the feudal. And he took special care never to “metamorphose” such an “historical sketch of the genesis of capitalism in Western Europe into an historico-philosophical theory of the marche generale imposed by fate upon every people whatever the historical circumstances in which it finds itself in order that it may ultimately arrive at the form of economy which will ensure, together with the greatest expansion of the productive powers of social labor, the most complete development of man.” To N. K. Mikailovski, the Russian populist writer, who had thus “metamorphosed” Marx’s historical analysis, he offered the example of Rome where the combined emergence of free proletarians and accumulated wealth did not result in capitalism. Marx concluded: “Thus events strikingly analagous but taking place in different historical surroundings led to totally different results. By studying each of these forms of evolution separately one can easily find the clue to this phenomenon, but one will never arrive there by the universal passport of a general historico-philosophical theory the supreme virtue of which consists in being super-historical.” (Marx, Selected Correspondence, pp. 352-355).

To my mind Mr. Deutscher is guilty of having used in a different context just such a wrong method of social analysis.

The point Mr. Deutscher emphasizes is that industrialization leads to democratization. The industrial revolution in England led to a gradual democratization. So it will be in Russia. But such an analogy neglects the trends of world economic development as they were in the early 19th century and as they are in the mid 20th century, one vastly different from the other, as well as the impact on them of different national contexts. Can we then believe that industrialization tends to develop democracy by itself, so to speak, and at any time? The case of Germany, or of Japan, proves, however, that a specific and very complex combination of factors, involving far more than the mer...