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[The stiff-starched uniform of official rhetoric which these Moscow scholars put on (do they ever take it off? in bed' ) a s they try to explain ( away) why Herzen couldn't stand Marx and vice versa is as confining intellectually as were physically the uniforms Herzpn found so absurd and repulsive on the pPrsons of the Tsar's bureaucrats. Both are too tight to allow any freedom of individual (i.e., human) expression. (D.M. ) ) O n the other hand, Marx and Engels in the late forties and early fifties had not at their disposal the objective, indisputable data which \vould have made it possible for them to judge of the good aspects of the revolutionary activity of Iskander (Herzen's pen-name) and hovv profoundly he was related to the development of progressive thought in Russia and the revolutionary stimulus he exerted on the Russian intelligentsia.
However, certain aspects of Herzen's activity could not but provoke in Marx and Engels extreme caution and even hostility: his pessimistic view of the revolutionary movement in the West and, following from this, certain erroneous predictions about the future of the Slavs and of Western Europe which caused Marx to charge that, in Ht>rzen's Yiew, 'the old. rottPn Europe must be rPvivificd by the Yictory of Panslavism,' although in fact Herzen oftpn denounced 'imperialistic Panslavism.'
Marx criticized Herzen's populist views, seeing in his hopes for the Russian commune merely Panslavism and noting that Herzen 'had discoYerPd thP Russian commune not in Russia but in the book of a Prussian Regierurzgsrat named Haxthausen.'
[This crack is typical of the kind of polemical infighting Marx often
in for. It is defective ( a ) epistemologically and (b) factually. ( a ) The provenance of a fact or idea doesn't affect its validity: worse men than Haxthausen have told the truth and added to wisdom. As for (b) , see pp. 310-12 of Martin Malia's Her::.en and the Birth of Russian Socialism, which state that while ( 1 ) "Hcrzen's first reference to the socialist possibilities of the Russian peasant commune
[or mir] occurs in his Diarr in 1843 apropos of a visit to Russia of the Prussian ethnologist, Baron Haxthausen [ the baron, Regierurzgsrat though he was, whatever that issounds terrible, which is why Marx uses it-was a perfectly sPrious scholar. D.M. ] u:ith whom he had a long conversation," the fact is also (2) that he hac! written about the mir in an 1 83G essay and was by then "aware that the absence of
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private property in the commune distinguished Russia from the West." Then (3) Malia proceeds to pull what's left of the Haxthausen rug from under Marx's polemical stance:
"It is virtually certain, however, that Herzen first heard the idea of the 'socialist' character of the commune not from Hazthausen but from the Slavophiles." For another page and a half he patiently untangles the Gordian knot, a pleasant contrast to IVIarx's method which was more in the style of Alexander the Great, as was his accusation that Herzen was a Panslavist (maybe he got "Panslav" mixed up with "Slavophile"-which Herzen wasn't either) . In any case, see Malia passim for a non-Alexandrian unraveling of both questions. (D.M. ) ]
It followed from this that Marx and Engels, who, like Herzen, vvere living in London in the 1 850s and 1 860s, considered it impossible to make political speeches on the same platform with him.
[How "it followed from this"-unless one accepts sectarian spite and ignorance as a reasonable justification-! don't understand. The platform referred to was that of the 1 855
meeting organized by the Chartist Ernest Jones to commemorate "The Great Revolutionary IVIovement of 1 848."
Marx first accepted, then withdrew when he learned Herzen was going to speak. See pp. 482-3 above, for ! Ierzen's account of the incident, which is not objected to there (or here) by the Soviet academicians. (D.M. ) ]
Herzen was inclined to attach to Marx as well his criticism of the German petty-bourgeois emigrants for their nationalism, narrow-mindedness and sectarianism. He could not understand the place in history that belonged to him.
[Possibly because Marx didn't then have much of a "place in history." If Herzen had foreseen how big it would be, he would have been even more depressed than after 1 848. Still, if only out of touristic curiosity-he \vas a masterful tourist
-he had made a social effort (even Marx might have thawed if they'd ever met), what an interesting portrait \Ve might have had ! Not all unflattering, either: Herzen was as generous as he was perceptive. He wouldn't have confused Marx, once he'd met him, with the other German emigrants.
Maybe worse, maybe better, but certainly not petty-bourgeois. (D.M. ) ]
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This was aggravated by the conflicts that arose because of Herzen's friendly relations with Bakunin and Karl Vogt.
[They might have added Proudhon, to whose demolishment Marx devoted a whole book, The Poverty of Philosophy. He also wrote a much smaller book, Herr Vogt, attacking the Swiss naturalist as the wrong kind of materialist-the undialectical, or philistine, kind. "Herr Vogt"-Marx never let u�was a close friend of and an influence on Herzen.
Naturally. Sometimes the Herzen-Marx antagonism seems so perfect as to suggest instinct, like cat-dog or mongoosecobra. (D.M. ) ]
Plekhanov as right when, in 'Herzen the Emigre,' h e wrote:
'Only with Marx and his small circle-with the "Marxids" as Herzen called them-was he on bad terms. This was the result of a series of unhappy misunderstandings. It was as if some evil fate had prevented rapprochement between the founder of scientific socialism and the Russian publicist who was exerting himself to set socialism on a scientific basis.'
[That Plekhanov, most steadfast of Marxids, was driven to so un-Marxian a formulation as "an evil fate" to bridge the chasm, shows its depth. But isn't there a less mystical explanation: wasn't it simply Marx's temperament-reclusive, exclusive with more than a bit of paranoiac suspicion: a reverse negative of Herzen's-that made "rapprochement"
impossible? Herzen's relations with his fellow exiles in London were as ecumenical as Marx's were parochial. As Plekhanov notes and as the memoirs show, Herzen was on human terms-friendly, critical, ironical but always sociable terms, seeing them and sharing platforms with them whether he agreed or disagreed-with the big, and small, fry of every national group except for "Marx and his small circle." While Marx seems to have disliked, despised, and kept aloof from everybody outside his cenaclc: Ledru-Rollin, Louis Blanc, Mazzini, Garibaldi, Robert Owen ( Engels dealt with him in Socialism-Scientific and Utopian) , Worcell and his Poles, Kossuth and his Hungarians-the whole menagerie. "The only company he could easily stand,"
writes J. Hampden Jackson in /Harz, Proudhon and European Socialism, "was that of GPrmans." And even there he had no use for outsiders like Ruge and Kinkel or, later, that