Late Marx and the Russian Road

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Теодор Шанин. Late Marx and the Russian Road

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Late Marx and the Russian Road

Teodor Shanin

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While clearly impatient with banal sentimentality, Marx was a humanist and an heir to the culture of the Enlightenment, in which he was steeped. His scholarship was a chosen tool in the service of a grand ethical design of liberation of human essence from its alienation caused by the grip of nature as well as by the man-made worlds of class-split societies. The best evidence of that side to Marx is his unwaning appeal today, which is, after all, not like an adoration of the multiplication table. To purify ‘mature’ Marx from the philosophical ethics of early Marx, to divide aspects of his thought into separate boxes, or to be ashamed ‘on his behalf’ of the claim for the moral content of socialism, is to do him indeed ‘too much honour’ (by someone else’s code of practice) and ‘too much injury’ (by that of his own).66

Gods remain unchanged by the process of creation and, it was said, can think only of themselves. If metaphors are to be used, Marx was not a god but a master craftsman. Craftsmen change matter while changing themselves in the process of creation. Also, if a dilettante is indeed ‘a man who thinks more of himself than of his subject’, Marx was professional in his analytical skills and therefore self-critical to the utmost. He was often tart in his critical comments and polemics, but for a man greatly admired by his own circle he was remarkably free from self-deification.

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