Page:The Spirit of Russia by T G Masaryk, volume 2.pdf/355

329 cipation of the future; it is not an ideological superstructure, but an anteroom.

Just as little as the intelligentsia, as a class and as a living representative of mental work, fits into the Marxist two-class system, so little, too, can the state, its political and administrative functions, and political life in general, be conceived as ideology in the Marxist sense. The weakening of tsarist absolutism, the establishment of the duma, and the legalisation of political electoral work and political party work in general, have an independent and high value of their own for Russia and for Europe. The alliance of the socialists with the liberals was necessary and right. Is it proper for a socialist to carry on propaganda among the peasantry and not among the bourgeoisie? Struve did good service by going to the bourgeois as before him the narodniki had gone to the people; the reasons he may subsequently have found for abandoning Marxism are another story.

In 1883 and 1884 Plehanov was perfectly right in holding fast to the Communist Manifesto, and in deducing therefrom rules for the political struggle and for cooperation with the liberals and the bourgeoisie. But in the nineties, and subsequently during the revolution, abandoning the teachings of the Communist Manifesto, he preached the later theories of Marx and Engels, and preached them in a manner altogether too one-sided.

The Communist Manifesto does not yet exhibit the doctrine of historical materialism in its full bloom, for the writing derives from the earlier phase of Marx and Engels, when they were political radicals, political revolutionaries, and not as yet Marxists. Later only did Marx and Engels formulate historical materialism with precision, and ascribe a decisive significance to the economic basis. The weakness of the political revolution of 1848, the triumph of reaction, the apolitism which, as far as practice was concerned, was forced upon the refugees, led Marx to conceive his historical materialism; his English experiences were responsible for his mistaken overestimate of the importance of economic conditions. From the English outlook, regular political activity appeared comparatively worthless. It was the parliamentarism of universal suffrage which ultimately taught Engels to esteem political, activity more highly, and to oppose parliamentarism to revolutionism.

This political development of Marxism and of the German