With the appearance of his second and posthumously published volume of The Political Ideas of Marx and Engels, Richard N. Hunt has established his place in the tradition of outstanding Marx scholarship personified by Franz Mehring, Gustav Mayer, David Riazanov, and Boris Nicolaevsky. The two volumes brim over with information and insightful interpretations but are at the same time (unlike so much Marx scholarship) clearly written and easily accessible to any serious reader.
Richard Hunt died of leukemia in 1982 at the age of 51. He is not well known in left-wing intellectual circles, which is not surprising. A modest American-born historian whose teaching career was mostly confined to the University of Pittsburgh, Hunt had little inclination to engage in polemical sorties in radical journals; he was a very gentle man who did not have the intense temperament of a political militant. There were political affiliations: the Young Progressives of America, the Independent Socialist League, the Socialist Party, and finally the Democratic Socialists of America. But Dick Hunt’s energies were concentrated on his teaching, on capably chairing the university’s history department from 1976 to 1980, and on producing a few very useful works of scholarship, including German Social Democracy, 1818-1850 (1964) and an anthology entitled The Creation of the Weimar Republic: Stillborn Democracy? (1969).
His masterwork, however, rises well above the level of simply “capable scholarship.” The first volume, published in 1974, was subtitled Marxism and Totalitarian Democracy, 1818-1850, and its value has been appreciatively noted by other scholars over the past decade. He completed the second volume literally days before he died—through an effort which in itself constitutes an inspiring act of affirmation and commitment. It has now been published with the subtitle Classical Marxism, 1850-1895.
In his preface to the second volume, Hunt offers an acknowledgment characteristic of the man:
At the end of so many years of work on what was to be a “comprehensive” study, I am also more aware of its actual limitations. I have not dealt at all with Marx and Engels’ views on international relations, for example, especially relationships between more advanced and less advanced countries, or the political aspects of ethnic minority conflicts, or women’s rights issues—all topics of considerable interest. But I am pleased to see that other writers are taking up such subjects and will fill out the gaps left in this book.
He very much saw the work in which he was engaged as a collective effort. Nonetheless, the two volumes stand as a substantial achievement of intellectual history and a most impressive contribution for those who are concerned with socialist ideals and ideas.
In the face of “scholarly” mountains and swamps of Cold War anti-Marxism, Richard Hunt has insisted that the Marxism of Marx and Engels was profoundly antitotalitarian. A salient feature of his two-volume work is the patient and uncompromising thoroughness with which he demonstrates—in lucid prose and a seemingly dispassionate (but in fact deeply yet quietly passionate) tone—that from the 1840s until the end of their lives Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels were “tough-minded democrats” (vol. I, p. 16). Any honest scholar who wishes to assert the contrary will now have to confront the massively documented and closely reasoned account which is presented in these volumes. Hunt’s familiarity with the secondary literature on Marxism is impressively wide ranging. Even more impressive is his familiarity with the immense quantity of Marx’s and Engels’ own works. “I have examined everything Marx and Engels wrote,” he writes in the preface to his first volume, “convinced that such Germanic thoroughness must find its due reward. And indeed, many famous but notoriously ambiguous texts, for example, in the Communist Manifesto, can be elucidated with the help of contemporaneous essays and letters that are almost unknown” (vol. I, p. XIII). This is not an empty boast. One benefit of reading these volumes is that they give the reader a sense of “the lay of the land” in the vast and complex terrain of the Marx-Engels collected works, even if one does not fully accept some of Hunt’s interpretive cartography. Also, the author consistently strives to relate the texts to biographical and historical contexts. We find ourselves not simply in the realm of ideas, but also confronting the realities of European and world history, as well as the realities of the labor and socialist movements of the nineteenth century.
Hunt explores a number of major themes in the works of Marx and Engels: the theory of the state; the problem of bureaucracy; revolutionary strategy; tactics and ethics; the relationship of revolutionary theory to the workers’ movement; the question of class alliances; problems of revolutionary organization; the nature of capitalism, of the precapitalist past, and of the socialist future. Their specific analyses of how such questions relate to realities in Germany, France, England, the United States, and Russia are similarly presented with sophistication and clarity.
One of the most interesting aspects of the second volume of Hunt’s study is his examination of Marx’s vision of the socialist future, which he labels a “democracy without professionals” and sees as the most revolutionary component of Marxism. He argues that this vision of society, in which the “free development of each is the condition for the free development of all,” in fact flows from the classical political and social thought of Greek antiquity in which both Marx and Engels were steeped.
Hunt’s challenging presentation of the political thought of Marx and Engels provides problems that those to his left and to his right will have to wrestle with for some time to come. Each reader owes it to himself or herself to explore the interpretations and confront the challenges offered by this passionate but careful scholar.
Here it may be worthwhile to question an important theme that was put forward by this man who was my own teacher and friend.
In 1929 Eduard Bernstein confided to one young scholar: “The Bolsheviks are not unjustified in claiming Marx as their own. Do you know? Marx had a strong Bolshevik streak in him!” (quoted in Sidney Hook, Towards the Understanding of Karl Marx). Bernstein, the theoretical “father of revisionism” in the German Social Democratic Party, an acquaintance of Marx and an intimate of Engels, and the editor of the first edition of their correspondence, was—one might think—in a position to know. This is precisely one of the notions, however, that Hunt seeks to refute. In my opinion, it helps to bring into focus the central weakness of his study.
Hunt sees Leninism as a totalitarian distortion of Marxism and attempts to stress “what separated Marx and Engels from the later doctrines of Leninism,” specifically setting for himself the “task of de-Russification” (vol. I, p. xiv; vol. II, p. xi). This results in serious oversimplification, both in regard to the nature of Leninism and the Bolshevik experience and in regard to a key problem of Marxism.
Leninism’s totalitarian elements, in Hunt’s opinion, include the nature of the revolutionary vanguard party which Lenin sought to create, Lenin’s conception of the relationship of this vanguard to the workers and the oppressed, and the strategy for revolution in Russia that Lenin advanced. All of these elements, Hunt believes, led to the totalitarian order which came to be known as Stalinism.
Unfortunately, Hunt’s running polemic against Lenin lacks the scholarly attention to detail and complexity that is applied to Marx and Engels. The “Germanic thoroughness” with which he embraces Marx and Engels is absent here. There is fleeting reference to three of Lenin’s works. It is acknowledged in a footnote that an article by Ernest Mandel provides a “Leninist-Trotskyist vindication of considerable merit,” but no effort is made to demonstrate the supposed inadequacies of that vindication (vol. I, p. 162). And there is no apparent awareness of an impressive body of scholarship which provides a far more complex, richly textured, and significantly different understanding of Leninism. (For example: Marcel Liebman’s Leninism Under Lenin, Neil Harding’s two-volume study, Lenin’s Political Thought, Tony Cliff’s four-volume Lenin, Victor Rabinowitch’s The Bolsheviks Come to Power, works by Isaac Deutscher, Stephen Cohen, Norman Geras, Michael Lowy, etc.)
One might object that Hunt is writing about Marx and Engels, not Lenin—yet he brings up Lenin time and again as a negative foil against which to contrast the virtues of his (and Lenin’s) two heroes. The problem of Lenin is not tangential to Hunt’s work but goes to the heart of it, because of the element of truth in Eduard Bernstein’s comment about Marx’s “Bolshevik streak.” Hunt sees Marx and Engels as revolutionary socialists, but he tends to underplay the tensions that are inherent in this. The socialist vision of Marx and Engels, as Hunt convincingly demonstrates, is profoundly democratic and humanistic. But how is such a vision to be realized, given the no less profound inhumanity, irrationality, and violence that are inherent in capitalism?
The coexistence in Marxism of “tough-minded democracy” and a “Bolshevik streak” has caused more than one writer to speak of an “ambiguous legacy.” Yet some would argue (correctly I think) that the Marxism of Lenin and Trotsky, culminating in the Bolshevik revolution, was profoundly democratic. This does not resolve the problem, however, because the Bolshevik revolution itself quickly degenerated—under the agonizing impact of economic collapse, civil war, and foreign intervention—into a one-party dictatorship, and this degeneration in turn cleared the way for the emergence of Stalinist totalitarianism.
The problem, it could be argued, arises not in the theoretical perspective of Marx and Engels (or Lenin) but in the messier realm of applying ideas to reality. Any effort to organize a revolutionary mass movement, no matter how democratic its theories and ideals, inevitably runs the risk of degenerating into an undemocratic enterprise. The profound and complex changes of socialist transformation—to be carried out on a massive and global scale over an extended period of time, and in the face of fierce resistance by a variety of powerful forces—generates a vast array of difficulties which, in many cases, Marx and Engels could hardly have anticipated. Much of their political writing seems to assume that the socialist revolution would unfold under relatively favorable circumstances, with at least several of the more advanced industrial countries embarking on the transition from capitalism at the same time. This does not describe the history of the twentieth century.
One of the great traumas of our time has been the perception that the vibrant dreams of revolutionary Marxism could turn into the Stalinist nightmare. It has led to the despair expressed by Albert Camus, who concluded: “Every revolutionary ends by becoming either an oppressor or a heretic. . . . It is time to foresake our age and its adolescent furies.”
Camus’ error is to focus his attention simply on revolutionary ideologies. Oppression, tyranny, and slaughter have been justified under the banner of Marxism—but no less under the banners of conservatism, liberalism, Christianity, Islam, Judaism, nationalism, and even “end-of-ideology” pragmatism.
The fact also remains that, ideology aside, we continue to face all of the problems, oppressions, and horrors described by Marx—and then some. Even if we decided to forsake the “adolescent furies” of socialism, there is no way to escape the age in which we live. We continue to face the questions of which side we are on and what is to be done. Even deciding to take no sides and to do nothing constitutes a choice to acquiesce in the injustice and violence of the status quo.
As Richard Hunt would have argued, we cannot expect to establish heaven on earth. Ours must be the more modest task of struggling for dignity, justice, and survival. Marx argued that there is little hope of securing such goals without a socialist revolution.
It was Hunt’s conviction that the political ideas of Marx and Engels would be invaluable tools in the struggle for a better world. Despite “end-of-ideology” and “liberal consensus” and “neoconservative” intellectual fashions, not to mention the grubbier pressures of the status quo, he continued to take Marxism seriously and wanted to help pass it on to others. He would have been the last to see these ideas as holy dogma to be enshrined and worshipped. Rather, they must be utilized in this crude and corrupt world of ours, and in this way be continually renewed and refined. But first these ideas of Marx and Engels must be understood in a way that is faithful to their original meaning, and it is to such understanding that Richard Hunt sought to contribute.
Something of his own outlook, an intertwined pessimism and optimism, comes through in the words with which he chose to conclude his final book:
We must likewise remember that visionary ideals, even if never realized, offer useful vantage points from which to examine and criticize existing institutions and search for alternatives. “To be radical is to grasp the root of the matter,” Marx had written, “but for man the root is man himself. . . . The criticism of religion ends with the teaching that man is the highest being for man, hence the categorical imperative to overthrow all relations in which man is a debased, enslaved, forsaken, despicable being” (vol. II, p. 367).
Whatever the limitations of this two-volume study, it is far more than simply a monumental work of scholarship. It is a tremendous resource for those prepared to engage in the process of renewal and in the struggle for social justice.