Extracts from Chernyshevsky's 1858 article criticizing the contemporary views on the Russian mir and communal ownership. Chernyshvesky rejected the idea that the Russian commune was an old-fashioned institution that should be replaced with the supposedly more "advanced" capitalist form of land ownership; he instead argued that the communal form was in fact a higher stage of development itself. The article was written prior to the 1861 emancipation of the serfs and appeared in the Vol. 72 No. 12 issue of the literary and political journal Sovremennik (The Contemporary), which Chernyshevsky often contributed to and eventually became the chief editor of. Imprisoned in 1862 for his writings in the same journal and later sentenced to exile, Chernyshevsky was a major influence on Russian socialists, such as the Narodniks. He additionally influenced Karl Marx himself, who praised Chernyshevsky in the postface of the second edition of Capital (describing him as a "great Russian scholar and critic") and in other places.
Before the question of the rural commune [obshchina] acquired practical importance, with the beginning of work on the transformation of village relations, the Russian obshchina constituted an object of mystical pride for exclusive worshippers of the Russian national character, who imagined that nothing resembling our communal system existed among other peoples and that it must, therefore, be regarded as an innate peculiarity of the Russian or Slav race, of exactly the same kind as, for instance, cheekbones broader than in other Europeans, or a language which calls men muzh and not mensch, homo or l'homme, and which has seven cases, not six as in Latin or five as in Greek.1 By now, educated and impartial people have shown that a communal land system, in the form which now exists in our country, exists among many other people who have not yet emerged from relations close to the patriarchal way of life, and did exist among all the rest when they were close to that way of life. It turned out that communal ownership of land had existed among the Germans, among the French, among the forebears of the English, among the forebears of the Italians, in short among all European peoples; but then in the course of subsequent historical evolution it gradually fell out of use, giving way to private land ownership. The conclusion from this is clear. It is no use our considering communal ownership as a peculiar, innate feature of our national character; we should regard it rather as a general human property, belonging to a certain period in the life of every people. Also, there is certainly no point in our taking pride in the fact that this remnant of primitive antiquity has been preserved, just as in general no one should take particular pride in anything antique whatsoever, since preservation of the antique only testifies to the slow and sluggish nature of historical development. Preservation of the obshchina in relation to land, while among other peoples it has disappeared in this sense, proves only that we have lived far less than these peoples. Thus this fact is quite useless for the purpose of crowing over other nations.
Such a view is absolutely correct; from it, however, Russian and foreign economists of the old school have taken it into their heads to draw the following conclusion: 'Private landed property is a later form that has supplanted apparently communal ownership, which with the historical development of social relations has proved unable to stand up to it; hence, like other nations, we must abandon it if we want to go forward along the path of development.'
This conclusion serves as one of the most fundamental and general bases for rejecting communal ownership. One could hardly find a single adversary of communal ownership who would not repeat with all the others: 'Communal ownership is a primitive form of land relations, while private landed property is a second stage; how should one then not prefer the higher form to the lower?' There is only one strange thing here, for us. Many of the adversaries of communal ownership are followers of the new German philosophy: some boast of being Schellingists, others strongly support the Hegelian school. So what puzzles us about these same people is how they have failed to notice that, by stressing the primitive nature of communal ownership, they were bringing out precisely that aspect of it which must extremely powerfully predispose in favour of communal ownership all those who are familiar with the discoveries of German philosophy regarding the continuity of forms in the process of world development. . . .
For our part, we are not disciples of Hegel, still less disciples of Schelling. But I cannot but acknowledge that both these systems have rendered great services to science, by discovering the general forms through which the development process moves. The basic result of these discoveries is expressed by the following axiom: 'In its form, the higher stage of development resembles the source from which it proceeds.' This notion contains within itself the fundamental essence of Schelling's system. It was revealed even more precisely and in greater detail by Hegel, whose whole system consists in the enactment of this basic principle through all the phenomena of world life, from its most general conditions to the minutest details of each particular sphere of existence. For readers familiar with German philosophy, our subsequent amplification of this law will not represent anything new; it must serve only to highlight the inconsistency of people who have failed to notice that they are providing weapons against themselves when they so forcibly stress how primitive a form communal ownership is. . . .
* * *
The perusal of articles against communal ownership has convinced us that dislike of this form of land relations is based not so much on facts or ideas specifically related to the object in question, as on general philosophical and moral views about life. We consider that prejudices concerning the particular question which interests us can only be destroyed through the exposition of sound ideas, in opposition to the backward philosophemes or philosophical and moral oversights upon which their prejudices are based. . . .
* * *
Leaving aside the political system, whose history could also serve as a striking confirmation of our argument regarding the general predominance of this norm of development, we shall cite as examples only two further social institutions.
In the beginning, society knows no separate estate of judges; justice and punishment in the primitive tribe are meted out by all the independent members of the tribe at a general meeting (village assembly). Gradually judicial power is hived off from the citizens and made the monopoly of a specific estate; the public character of legal proceedings vanishes, and a trial procedure that is very well-known to us is established—it existed in France and Germany too. But now society develops further: instead of judges, delivery of the verdict is entrusted to jurors—in other words, ordinary members of society who have no learned training in juridical technique—and the original form of the court returns. (1. Society passed judgment; 2. jurists appointed by government authority pass judgment; 3. jurors, i. e. simply representatives of society, pass judgment.)
Like justice, the military function too in primitive society is a property of all members of the tribe, without any specialization. The form of military power is at first everywhere identical: irregulars who take up arms on the outbreak of war and revert to peaceful pursuits in time of peace. There is no specific military estate. Gradually one forms, and attains, a high degree of individuality with long terms of service or with mercenary recruitment. We can still remember a time when a soldier in our country became a soldier for his entire life, and no one apart from these soldiers knew the military craft or took part in wars. But then terms of service begin to grow shorter, and the system of indefinite furlough becomes more and more widespread. Finally (in Prussia), it reaches a point where absolutely every citizen becomes a soldier for a certain time (two or three years), and soldiering no longer belongs to a specific estate, but is merely a certain period in the life of every man in each estate. Here its specificity has been maintained only in a periodic-service stipulation. In North America and Switzerland there is no longer even that: exactly as in the primitive tribe, in peacetime the army does not exist while in time of war all citizens take up arms. So once again there are three phases, with the highest, in form, representing a complete return of the most primitive: 1. absence of regular troops, militia in time of war; 2. regular troops, no one except those specifically wearing uniform is called up or can take part in war; 3. a nationwide militia returns once more, and there is no regular army in peacetime. . . .
The norm we have described, which no one in the least familiar with contemporary thinking about the general laws of the world can doubt, will inevitably lead to land relations being formed as follows:
- Primitive state (beginning of development). Communal ownership of land. It exists because human labour does not have durable, valuable connections with a certain plot of land. Nomads have no agriculture, they do not carry out any work on the land. Agriculture, too, is at first not combined with the outlay of almost any capital strictly upon the land.
- Second stage (intensification of development). Agriculture requires outlays of capital and labour strictly upon the land. The land is improved by a whole number of different methods and works, of which manuring represents the most general and universal necessity. The man who lays out capital on the land must now inalienably own it; as a result, the land passes into private ownership. This form achieves its aims, because land-ownership is not an object of speculation but a source of regular income.
These are the two systems about which the adversaries of communal ownership speak. But only two, you see: where is the third? Is the course of development really exhausted by these two?
Industrial-commercial activity intensifies and produces a colossal growth of speculation. Speculation, after enveloping all other departments of the national economy, turns to the fundamental and most extensive branch: agriculture. That is why individual landed property loses its former character. Formerly, the owner of the land was the person who worked it and laid out his capital to improve it (the system of small proprietors cultivating their plots with their own hands; also the system of tenancy and hereditary share-cropping, with or without servile dependence). But now a new system appears: contract farming. Under this, when rent goes up as a consequence of the improvements the farmer has introduced, it falls into the hands of another person who has either not participated at all or only participated to a quite insignificant extent with his capital in improving the land, but who nevertheless profits from any return that the improvements may yield. Thus private ownership of land ceases to be a method of recompensing outlay of capital on the improvement of land. At the same time, cultivation of the land begins to require capital inputs that exceed the means of the vast majority of cultivators, while the farm economy requires dimensions which far exceed the capacities of an individual family and which—in terms of the extent of economic plots—also exclude (under private ownership) the vast majority of cultivators from sharing in the benefits afforded by the operation of that economy, thus turning this majority into hired workers. With these changes, the reasons which existed in former times for the advantage of private property in land over communal ownership are being destroyed. Communal ownership is becoming the sole means to give the vast majority of cultivators a share in the returns which the land comes to yield as a result of improvements effected in working it. Thus communal ownership is necessary not only for the well-being of the agricultural class, but also for the progress of agriculture itself. It appears the only full and rational way of combining the farmer's gain with improvement of the land and productive methods with conscientious execution of work. And without this combination, fully successful production is impossible.
Anyone familiar with the basic ideas of the modern world-view is irresistibly led to this most powerful conviction, precisely by that very characteristic of primitiveness which the adversaries of communal ownership adduce as its decisive disadvantage for them. Precisely this characteristic compels one to regard it as the form which relations on the land must assume, if a high level of development is to be achieved; precisely this characteristic indicates that communal ownership represents a higher form of man's relations with the land.
Whether at the present time our civilization has actually reached that high level whose features must include communal ownership is a question which can no longer be resolved through logical inductions or deductions from general world laws, but only through analysis of the facts. . . .
* * *
History, like a granny, is terribly fond of its younger grandchildren. Tarde venientibus she gives not ossa but medullam ossium,2 in breaking which Western Europe has hurt its fingers so painfully.
But we have been carried away in a dithyramb, we have been addressing the reader and forgetting that we must speak to the adversaries of communal ownership, in other words concern ourselves with the ABC. We shall now return to elementary concepts.
We were concerned with the question of whether a given social phenomenon has to pass through all the logical moments in the real life of every society, or whether under favourable circumstances it can leap from the first or second stage of development directly to the fifth or sixth, omitting the ones in the middle, as happens with the phenomena of individual life and in the processes of physical nature. . . .
Two whole printer's sheets have brought us to two conclusions which, for any reader at all familiar with the ideas of modern science, could have been adequately conveyed in six lines:
1. the higher stage of development coincides in form with its source;
2. under the influence of the high development which a certain phenomenon of social life has attained among the most advanced peoples, this phenomenon can develop very swiftly among other peoples, and rise from a lower level straight to a higher one, passing over the intermediate logical moments.
What a meagre outcome of arguments occupying two whole printer's sheets! Any reader with a modicum of education and sharpness of wit will say that it would have been enough simply to state these basic truths, which are obvious to the point of banality, like such facts as that the Danube flows into the Black Sea, the Volga into the Caspian, that Spitzbergen has a cold climate, the island of Sumatra a hot one and so on. To demonstrate such things in a book intended for literate people is indecent.
Quite so. To demonstrate and explain such truths is indecent. Yet what are you to do when conclusions drawn from these truths are rejected, or when people complacently repeat to you a hundred times, as if it were an unanswerable objection, some fantastic idea which can only be clung to through forgetfulness or ignorance of some elementary truth?
For example, you say: 'Communal ownership of land must be retained in Russia.' With a bold air of triumph they object, 'But communal ownership is a primitive form, while private property in land appeared later and is therefore a higher form of land relations.' Have pity on yourselves, Messrs. objectors, have pity on your learned reputations: you see precisely because, precisely because, precisely because communal ownership is a primitive form, one must consider that it is impossible for a higher stage of development of land relations to manage without this form. . . .
Just as that poor toiler the parochial teacher keeps up his strength with the thought of his wearisome occupation's high and great significance, so we too have fortified ourselves by recalling the weighty significance that the truisms we have been busy expounding have for clarifying our whole view of the world. . . .
Our first truism—do not judge it lightly: the eternal alternation of forms, the eternal rejection of the form engendered by a certain content or aspiration as a result of the strengthening of that same aspiration or a further development of that same content—whosoever has understood this great eternal, universal law and schooled himself to apply it to every phenomenon, oh! how calmly he invokes prospects which throw others into confusion! Repeating after the poet:
I have let things take their chance,
And the whole world belongs to me. . . .3
he has no regrets for anything which has had its day, and says: 'Whatever will be, will be, but in the end our day will come all the same.'
The second principle is almost more striking even than the first. For anyone who has grasped this principle, how entertaining is all talk about the inevitability of this or that evil, about how for a thousand years we must necessarily drink the bitter cup which others drank: but, you see, it has been drained by others, so why should we drink it? Their experience has instructed us, and their good offices assist us to prepare a new beverage, tastier and healthier. All that others have attained is a ready-made legacy to us. Not we laboured to invent the railways, but we use them.
Not we have fought against the mediaeval system, but when it falls in other countries it will not hold out in ours. You see, we too live in Europe and that is enough—all good achieved for itself by any advanced people is thereby already three-quarters prepared for us as well. All that is necessary is to find out what has been done and how, all that is needed is to understand the advantage, and then everything will be easy.
The hand of time lies heavy on us,
Labour exhausts us.
Fortune is all-powerful, life fragile—
But that which has once been gripped by life,
It is not in the power of the Fates to remove from us.4
Translation by Quintin Hoare taken from Teodor Shanin's Late Marx and the Russian Road (pp. 182-190). All footnotes and in-text commentary belong to the editor and/or translator unless otherwise stated.
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Here's the [url=[url=https:/…
Here's the original Russian if anyone's interested.
It's also worth pointing out that the Russian mir/commune existed both during and after serfdom and was characterized by, among other features, the periodic redistribution of land and communal decision-making. Nonetheless, the Russian mir certainly wasn't without its flaws, such as the often patriarchal character of the communes and peasants' blind faith in the tsar (e.g. serfs would often petition the tsar if their landlord behaved cruelly). Many of the mir's shortcomings were also no doubt intensified by the fact that it existed under serfdom and tsarist rule. Boris Gorshkov has written quite a bit about the Russian mir and peasantry in his rather enlightening Peasants in Russia from Serfdom to Stalin: Accommodation, Survival, Resistance (though I disagree with his portrayal of Marx as some enemy of the Russian peasantry/commune; Shanin's work—and Marx's own writings—show that he was anything but!):
Thanks for posting this,…
Thanks for posting this, adri, and for providing the background that you have of the communal form of ownership of the countryside under the mir. It may appear as historic to some but this topic still has relevance, in that there is still antagonism, as stark in the most advanced industrial countries as in the lesser developed, between countryside and city, sometimes even spilling out onto the pages of Libcom.
It would appear, at least from here in the countryside of England, that the bourgeoisie, naturally urban from its beginnings, has its designs on a further inroad into the countryside. Although not exactly the same in all countries, there is a decided move towards further incorporation of land into capital. Think of the class struggles regarding land ownership that immediately preceded the war over Ukraine, "the border country". Or, the ongoing attacks by the urban settlers in the Occupied West Bank on the remnant of small land owners, not to mention the painful fact that the farmland of Gaza, as well as its populus and housing stock, has been decimated by capitalist bombs.
One small point on the presentation on this page. The link to the Russian original of this article features a quote at its beginning in Russian. No quote appears in this English translation.
Everywhere I go: such woe, such woe, what woe!
As for the flaws inherent in the form of the mir, as for the flaws in contemporary organisation of property in the countryside, Marx's words still hold true: